Hear about the Great Depression from those who lived it.

Garfield County Libraries are working with Walter Gallacher, producer of the Immigrant Stories Project, to interview Garfield County residents about their experiences living through the Great Depression for the Big Read. All interviews in the series will be posted here. Do you have a Great Depression story you would like to share? Click here to see stories submitted by community members and to learn how you can submit your own narrative.

Did you or a loved one live through the Great Depression?

Do you have stories and photos you’d like to share?

Want to know how your story intersects with others?

Garfield County Libraries invites you to help create a community narrative

of this momentous event in history by sharing your story. 

Email your rememberance to gcpldadmin@gcpld.org and we'll post them here.

From Andrew “Tony” Tonozzi, Age 92, Glenwood Springs

Those black clouds of dust would come up and it would get so dark that the chickens would go to sleep in the middle of the day. We’d get in the house and start putting wet newspaper over the windowsills so the dust couldn’t filter in. When we’d go to sleep at night we’d put wet rags over our faces to breathe through. In the morning there would be two or three inches of silt on the front porch and we’d have to scoop it off.
     

The crops didn’t flourish at all. And then we got a grasshopper plague. We’d have a big trough about fifteen feet long on a skid. We’d hook a horse on the end of that and put water in the trough with kerosene.
     

We’d pull it through the fields and it had a curtain on the back and the grasshoppers would jump onto the curtain and fall down into this kerosene for water. We’d get enough grasshoppers to put them in a ditch and then we’d set them on fire. The grasshopper plague lasted for two years.
 

From Doris Lee Shettel, Rifle

Lots of things that would seem very hard to a kid today did not seem that way to me.  I barely remembered a better time.  Most of my neighborhood and school friends were just like me.  We wore our homemade clothing until it was too small or had too many holes.  If my shoes still fit when the soles had worn out, I put cardboard inside until my father got around to nailing on a new sole.  (How we hated rainy days when the cardboard melted and our feet got wet!)  At school I knew children who were better off than I was.  I also knew some who did not have enough to eat.  That made me thankful that our family was never hungry.  My kindly third grade teacher discreetly dispensed Ovaltine shakes in the cloakroom to a few very thin children.