Dirty Thirties
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During the Great Depression, a huge drought devastated the country's midsection. The lack of precipitation turned the Midwest into a Dust Bowl that could support little agriculture.

Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook.

In South Dakota, those terrible years were known as the "Dirty Thirties." Using archived tapes of survivors, correspondent Curt Nickish tells us more about the impact on the people and the land.

Most Americans know the 1929 stock market crash - called Black Tuesday - ushered in the Great Depression. But South Dakotans who lived through those years remember Black Sunday much better. The drought that struck the plains dried out the soil and wind covered everything with dust. Dorothy Finch remembers Black Sunday in this archived interview:

"You washed your dishes after you were done eating and put them away in the cupboard and then you washed them again before you used them. Because the dirt filtered in on everything. Your sheets were gray, your towels were gray, your underwear was grey, nothing turned out white when you washed. It was just terribly dirty".

While some people fled the region, others tried to stick it out. Grace Monroe and her husband, for instance, decided they needed a garden to help their schoolteacher salaries. She remembers in this archived recording.

"So we moved out to a little acreage at the edge of town. The year we moved out there and bought that place is the year the grasshoppers came in. The people who sold that acreage had a little garden, and I'll never forget seeing that garden with stumps. The grasshoppers had eaten every bit of the greenery."

Finally the rains came to end the drought, but by then, nearly fifty thousand residents had fled the state. South Dakota's population wouldn't recover for decades.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by the National Science Foundation.