The lasting impact of the Great Depression - North Carolina Digital History

[generations]

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Stan Hyatt talks about his family history and his father’s employment during the Great Depression. (0:44) About the recording

Rob Amberg: Was your family’s roots from there? And how long had your family been in the community?
Stan Hyatt: Two generations before me.
Rob Amberg: And what kind of work did your dad do?
Stan Hyatt: My dad did a lot of things. His, uh, the last work he did before he retired in Cleveland — he worked in a musical instrument factory, making instruments. Brass instruments.
Rob Amberg: But what did he do when you were in Barnardsville?
Stan Hyatt: He did a lot of things. He just moved around from job to job. He worked before — one of the last things he did in Barnardsville was work with his brother in a country store.

[his grandmother]

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Stan Hyatt talks about growing up in Madison County, North Carolina and living with his grandmother on her farm. (1:08) About the recording

Rob Amberg: Was there farming in your background at all?
Stan Hyatt: My grandmother had farmland and leased it out, and I helped with the tobacco chores and gardening and growing corn, things like that — feeding the pigs and feeding the chickens, milking the cows — when I was growing up with her.
Rob Amberg: So you had all of those things. And would you classify your grandma as somewhat self-sufficient on the farm?
Stan Hyatt: She was extremely self-sufficient. She lived after she raised six kids of her own. I lived with her a while, and she would have me go out to the woods and get roots and things out of the ground that she made medicines out of. I hunted. I would bring squirrels and fish back, and rabbits. My grandmother could fix anything. When her husband was still alive she cooked for a sawmill up there in Dillingham area. She was the most self-sufficient woman that I ever knew.

[impact of the Great Depression]

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Stan Hyatt recalls how his grandmother raised six children on her own during the Great Depression and reminisces about growing up poor. (1:32) About the recording

Rob Amberg: So she made her own medicines, then.
Stan Hyatt: Some of them. I’m not saying she made everything, but she had an understanding, having been raised in the mountains back in the Depression era days and before, of self-reliance. She lost all that she had in the Depression. She and her husband had accumulated five or six thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, and she lost it all. One day it was in the bank; the next day she went to Asheville and it was gone.
Rob Amberg: So that must have really tested her in terms of her self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
Stan Hyatt: It did. And about that same time her husband died, and so she had to raise six kids as a widow woman with no real income except off of the farm.
Rob Amberg: For you growing up, then, as a child and before you all moved to Cleveland, did you have a sense that this was in a way the perfect childhood? Or was it something that you felt you wanted to get away from?
Stan Hyatt: No, I never wanted to get away from western North Carolina. We were poor, and I realized we were poor, but it didn’t bother me at all. I had the woods and the creeks, and the mountains to climb. I was the happiest kid in the world growing up, and had nothing [laughter] that people — I mean, material things — that people would consider something today.

[father and son]

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Stan Hyatt describes how his father had a hard time finding steady work after the Great Depression. Because his father had to move the family to Ohio for work, Stan reminisces how he came back to western North Carolina during two different years to live with his grandmother. (1:23) About the recording

Stan Hyatt

In the late 50s there weren’t many jobs around here; not a lot of good-paying jobs and so forth. Coming off of the Depression years the economy hadn’t really picked up that well, and my dad just drifted from place to place looking for something better. That’s how he ended up in Ohio.

Actually, I moved back and forth to Ohio several times. My parents were up there regularly, but I didn’t like it up there in the big city — in Cleveland — near as well as I did out in the country. There weren’t enough things to entertain me in the city, so I came back. That’s how I stayed with my grandmother. She reached a point in time — her youngest daughter left home in the late 50s — that she was by herself, at that time in her sixties. And so I think it was 1960 I came back the first time, and stayed with Granny a year or two here. Went to elementary school at Barnardsville one year, and then went to North Buncombe High School one year. That’s when there wasn’t a middle school. You went straight to the eighth grade then, and I was in the eighth grade there. Then I went back to Ohio; then I came back. So I just kind of shuffled back and forth between Cleveland and down here.

[future economy]

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Stan Hyatt comments on the value of passing down traditions, especially those that lead to self-sufficiency. He describes the people of Madison County, North Carolina and remarks upon their incredible self-sufficiency. (2:34) About the recording

Stan Hyatt: Yes, I think it’s important that we pass down all the traditions that we possibly can. I asked my kids, and they think it’s funny when I ask them this question. I try to get them — or did when they were younger — try to get them to go out and help me garden. And there’s some work in gardening, having to dig and prune, and spray, and all that stuff you do gardening, plant things. I said, “Well, what would happen if the economy got bad again? Like, I’ve seen it when I was real little, or even worse before I was born. What would happen if that happened today and you couldn’t go over to Ingles in Mars Hill and buy bread and milk and so forth, what would you do?” I don’t want to be pessimistic or a forecaster of doom coming in the future, but to me that’s a valid question. That was, I guess, something my grandmother and others instilled in me. You have to be knowledgeable enough to take care of yourself and not depend on everybody else to lay things in your lap.
Rob Amberg: I think it’s good to be in a place where you can be, depend on yourself, too. Not every place is like that.
Stan Hyatt: I think Madison County, North Carolina has got to be up at the top of the list. I’ve met people over there, I have a neighbor that can sit down and make wagon wheels from scratch. I have people that can — they’re carpenters, they’re plumbers, they’re automobile mechanics. They can do anything. I’m not that gifted myself. I don’t want to mislead you and you think that I am, but these people in Madison County, because it was so shut in for so long and isolated somewhat geographically and by the road situation from the rest of the world, they learned to survive. I’m convinced that the older people over here could do just about anything to make a living if everything collapsed economy-wise and everything, and that to me is a very valuable thing to be able to do. They could make it. I feel like that a lot of people in the cities that have all the conveniences today, if we ever went into bad economic times, they would really suffer.

Next: War begins

Contents: The Great Depression and World War II

Chapter 3: Life during the Depression

Next: War begins
Previous: Krispy Kreme

As you read

This oral history interview with Stan Hyatt was conducted in 2000. Hyatt was born after the Great Depression, but the consequences of the economic collapse affected his family for years. In this interview, Hyatt describes how the Great Depression shaped the lives of his grandmother and father. He also discusses how the financial struggles of his family, brought on by the Depression, influenced the way he sees the world.

Oral history interviews are complicated sources. The person who was interviewed was remembering events that happened years earlier. The interviewer and interviewee made assumptions about each other, which affected the questions that were asked and the answers that were given. Interviews are not just memories; they are conversations shaped by beliefs and attitudes of the time period in which the interview was recorded.

Questions to consider

What types of jobs did Hyatt’s father do? Why was it difficult for him to find work in western North Carolina?
When Hyatt lived with his grandmother, what were his different chores? Why was it necessary for him to perform these different tasks?
How had living through the Great Depression effected Hyatt’s grandmother?
What happened to his grandmother’s savings?
Why did Hyatt live part of the time with his grandmother?
Why did Hyatt’s parents have to move to Cleveland?
At the end of the interview, Hyatt talks about his fears that America might go through another depression. Why does he believe this? What does he believe people should do to prepare themselves for another depression?

Learn more

For teachers

Lesson plan: The Great Depression: Impact over time In this lesson students listen to oral history excerpts from Stan Hyatt from Madison County and evaluate how the Great Depression affected one North Carolina family over time.