We had spent the winters of 1872 and 1873 in Lincoln, my husband teaching in an outside district. I had worked for a Peter Guile in his bakery store. When we started on our journey to the homestead already selected, he brought a flour bag of broken crackers and said,"Maybe these will come in handy."

The first night we camped by a creek and made our bed on the ground under the wagon. The air was sweet and fresh and soothing to us, as we were very tired. Our journey was without incident of interest until we reached Aurora, composed of two frame buildings with square fronts, one the post office, and the other the drug store of Dr. Meyers, and a sod blacksmith shop. Then we started to find the stakes of our future home, the South Half of the Northwest Quarter of Section 8, Town 10, Range 7, West, eight miles on the old trail and we sighted a sod house. The home of"Pop Ayers," as we afterward learned to call him.

We could stay all night? Yes! So after supper the men brought in hay and laid it on the dirt floor, and after quilts and pillows were in place we slept good. The morning looked threatening and Mr. Ayers said to me, "You'd better stay by my fire and if it's worth anything to you, you can pay me and if it isn't, you needn't."

Well, I thought I'd go on, so I replied, "I can hold the horses so I think I'll go with the men" The men were my husband and my stepfather, Benjamin Abbott, who afterwards was the postmaster of the Alvin office named for his father, Alvin Abbott.

So in due time we found the stakes left by the government survey. Mr. Abbott's land was the Southwest Quarter of the same section, and as he could not breathe in a sod house, he must have one of lumber--and then the building began. The wind blew so hard that first day that while Mr. Abbott held the shingles down the other nailed them down. That was Saturday. In the evening it began to rain and my husband said, "Looks like a storm, think I'll bring the wagon up here." It was just over the line. We made our bed on the floor as usual and in the morning I put out my hand and said, "What's that?" He answered, "It is the finest kind of snow" Well, what to do? The shack was only boarded up and not a batten on it, so we put quilts and blankets up to keep out the storm. It was the famous blizzard of 1873. We had a feather bed and Mr. Abbott had a straw bed, so at night they laid down the straw bed and I got on it and then they put the feather bed over me. The wind howled so that I had to shout to make Mr. Goodwin hear me standing at the foot of the bed. Then the bag of crackers came in handy, as I was out of bread. Mr. Abbott got in one side of me and Mr. Goodwin the other, and I stayed there two days and nights. On the second day the mare laid down and died, also Mr. Abbott's cow, and he brought the calf into the shack, 10 x 14. Once a day he's make coffee. We didn't have much fuel, only a few sticks we had brought from a creek. Old blind John, the horse, stood with head up and faced the storm.

Mr. Abbott's yoke of oxen wandered away to the lagoon and when he found them the larger one stood before the smaller one. Some people came over from the next section to the east to see if we were still alive.

Well, someone must go to Aurora for supplies and who but blind John and I. So Mr. Goodwin took two 2 x 4's and made a platform on two wheels of the wagon and put a box on it for a seat and John and I went. John had been used to going in the rut and that brought the wheels on the middle ridge and the side of the road, but we got there and back, and I had to be lifted off. But did that discourage us? Oh, no. We made a dugout for ourselves and enjoyed having company there. I very well remember the day the Dixons came to visit. After three years there we had a sod house with a floor and a cellar. Then one Sunday, Mrs. Dixon's voice outside said, "Hello Mrs. Dixon, we've come to move your baking day." And when they were starting for home after a pleasant day together we started at the west door and saw something that looked like rain--it turned out to be grasshoppers.

They stayed with us two weeks and their appetites were very good. They ate everything in sight and even made onions look like holes in the ground; and I heard it said that they even attacked some of the young men.

Every day about 10 a.m. they would rise in the air and when they found that the wind was moving, would settle down for dinner. Well, we lived through that, and one year raised a thousand bushels of corn worth ten cents per bushel. One year we had a drought, and last year we had 170 acres of crops--40 acres of barley east of the house was a beautiful sight gleaming in the sun. The men cut once around the field and came in to dinner--then a hail storm hit the field and everything was flattened out. Then we said it was enough, and went to Chapman.

The depression of the 1930s affected every part of life in the U.S. America came out of a time of seemingly great prosperity into a time of economic strife and starvation. The lives of my mother's parents were greatly affected, and what happened to them basically happened to everyone else. The hardships they faced were faced all across the country and the world in the time now titled The Great Depression.

My grandfather, Raymond W. Douglas, was born on Dec. 3, 1912. He grew up on a five acre farm five miles west of Aurora, Ne. The farm had a team of horses, a cow, some chickens and a couple of pigs. He went to a country school till the eighth grade,and then he went on to high school in Aurora. There were no school buses at that time; so he took turns driving an old ford into town with some of his friends. His mother died in May 1927 when he was in the ninth grade.

My grandfather said that they first felt the depression in the last part of 1928 when their bank at Murphy, Ne went belly up; his father had their savings in it. They received half of their money back, but the next bank that they started an account with also went broke.My grandmother's parents lost their entire farm to a bank and had to move to a rented farm.

My grandfather started working for his dinner at a small cafe in Aurora when he was in high school. Hamburgers were 5 cents and pie was 10 cents. After finishing high school he continued to work full time at the cafe for his meals and $5 a week. He continued working at this cafe till about 1931, hoping to raise enough money to go to business college; but the owner came to him on a Saturday night and informed him that things were so bad that he couldn't afford to keep any help.

There were no other jobs available. Grandfather felt that the world had come to an end; however, about three weeks later, he and a friend of his started a small cream and egg business at Murphy. The Fairmont creamery furnished the equipment and the checks to pay for the produce that they bought. They were in this produce station when Roosevelt became president and closed down the banks across the U.S, yet they still wrote the check to Fairmont Creamery and took the produce to Grand Island. Grand Island was one of the first places in the area to get cash which my grandfather took back to the farmers from which he had gotten the produce.

The creamery soon expanded its stock and sold everything from horse collars to groceries. They also had the post office in the station which paid according to the amount of business it received. This store was also one of the first to start in the trucking business.

Grandfather had to work all kinds of hours. He would work all day long in the store and then take a load of livestock into Omaha at night.The roads were very poor and it would be well after midnight when they got unloaded in Omaha. There they would get a bed for a few hours and then start back home. Sometimes they would have to go right back without any sleep so that the truck could make another haul the next morning.

The store owner bought and sold grain, fruit, vegetables, salt and other goods. This is where my grandfather learned to be a good salesman. He would, for instance, start out from Murphy with a load of livestock for Omaha, and then he would go over into Iowa and get a load of corn and start out for Kansas. He had to get the corn sold before he reached Hutchinson so he could buy a load of salt to bring back to Murphy. After a rest stop in Murphy, he would then head for western Nebraska. He had to have the salt sold by the time he reached Alliance, Ne, where he would buy a load of potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes or whatever was in season. Then he would head back to Murphy selling the vegetables all the way. He slept many nights on top of a load of corn or potatoes.

After a couple of years in this line of work, my grandfather went to work for his cousin in Aurora at a produce station which he soon owned. During most of this time, he lived with his father. They still had to pump water by hand, but they had electricity by 1932. He married my grandmother in 1934. They ran the produce station together and prospered.

My grandfather expressed his thoughts on the depression in this quote, "We had it bad, but others had it worse and we struggled through it and learned a lot at the same time. I hope we never have times like that again as the people now would have trouble changing their ways of life." He died three and a half years ago at the age of seventy-five. I received this information from a letter that he wrote to my cousin who was working on a similar project.

I didn't know my grandfather that well, he had Parkinson's disease and had trouble speaking. This project has taught me a lot that I never knew about him. It has also, in a way, brought me closer to him. I also think I understand what it must have been like during the depression. It was a time in which you had to have will-power, belief in yourself, and overall, hope, to survive.