Higher Calling-Part Two

Just How It Was

Life in southern Virginia during the 20s and 30s was just about as hard as anywhere in the country. Following the first World War, times were tough. Prior to the war, farmers who had a bit of land and money made out pretty good. There was money to buy tractors and machinery, making the farms more productive and efficient. Agricultural science was a new field of study that focused on improving rural life. Extension agents helped to educate the farmers on everything from improving livestock to preventing crop diseases. 

For the hired farmhand or a family scraping by with a piece of land, improvements did little to improve life. By the time of the Depression, these families could only grow hard times for a crop. Many pulled up stakes for the promise of work in the north. 

For some families, moving north just wasn’t an option. Men left to find work building the expanding lines of railroads. Ultimately, these network of railroads would function primarily for moving crops from farm to market. In the southwest, cities like Roanoke and Lynchburg grew quickly, but many rural communities stayed just that, rural.

Hard to imagine the rough, physical life. Cutting through mountains to make a railway tunnel; cutting down trees and shaving the mountains bare for logging; even digging and burrowing into the mountains to pull out tons of that shadowy coal. Such were the ways of life as we forged a new path and grew the country. 

Being a farmer was no easier. Results were almost always the same, the rich got richer and the poor stayed poor. Something honorable in a hard day’s work to make a living. A bit unfair that much of that hard work earned many the sole right to just barely make a living. So goes the old song that talks of rewards in heaven. 

The people of southern Virginia defined that cultural melting pot. Mixed it up likely more than any cultivated gumbo pot simmering in the Mississippi Delta. From the Germans in the Shenandoah Valley, followed by the Scotch-Irish, French, Welsh, Irish, and all manner of English folk. Lest the world forgets, Africans brought over as slaves, then freed, then subjugated. Virginia was certainly a land of opportunity open to all.