As I was wandering the web, I found this article by Roger Gosden. I had been lead there by a comment from Jan Steinman on another article. I had never heard of this first, more Easterly migration from farms to the cities and the connection with the chestnut tree, and thought others might find it as interesting as I did.
“This chestnut orchard (or forest as one may call it) spread along the mountainside as far as the eye could see. The expanse of broad-topped, fruitful trees was interspersed with a string of villages of stone houses. The villages were connected by a good road that wound horizontally in and out along the projections and coves of the mountainside. These grafted chestnut orchards produced an annual crop of food for men, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats, and a by-crop of wood. Thus for centuries trees had supported the families that lived in the Corsican villages. The mountainside was uneroded, intact, and capable of continuing indefinitely its support for the generations of men.”
J. Russell Smith. Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, 1929
In the 1920’s there were also miles and miles of hardwood tree forests in the east and southeast of the US. One in four of them were American Chestnuts. Farmers in those areas used chestnut wood for everything from homes and barns to fence posts and heating wood, and chestnuts as food for themselves, cooked alone or in local dishes, and dried for flour.
Roger Gosden writes:
When Russell Smith rode through Corsica in the 1920s he saw chestnut trees growing on stony mountain slopes where most other crops could never grow. The land didn’t need irrigating or fertilizing or plowing, and hardly required attention from the villagers before harvesting the tasty, nutritious nuts in September. Chestnuts were called “the food of laziness.”
But by the 1920’s, the chestnuts were dying. The chestnut blight was accidentally introduced to North America around 1904 when Endothia parasitica was introduced into the United States from Japanese nursery stock. By 1906, 98% of the chestnut trees in the Bronx were infected. The blight moved 50 miles a year, and in a few decades 3 to 4 billion chestnut trees died, leaving only a couple hundred trees that were uninfected. By the late 1920’s, many farmers were leaving the farms of Appalachia. The death of the chestnuts were the death of many of the farms. Several million moved from their subsistence farms to large cities to find employment. Besides farmers, logging and leather tanning were seriously affected. Chestnut is a straight grained, rot-resistant wood, and the chestnuts were a key source of tannin. Those industries suffered great losses as the trees died.
In 1929, Black Tuesday marked the beginning of the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, in the Southwest, the spring of 1930 was dry. After a decade of wet, fertile years, the grain fields dried up. It was the beginning of an eight year drought.
Gosden:
The prairies had been a stable biome for eons because the topsoil was anchored by prairie grasses and fertilized by bison and other grazers. But like the mountain men, prairie farmers were cultivating land as their ancestors had in Europe where agricultural practices had evolved over centuries in a gentler climate. After plowing deeply for planting and leaving the ground bare in winter after gathering the cereal and cotton crops the dry topsoil blew away in great swirling clouds, some of the dust settling as far away as New York.
www.u-s-history.com/...
One hundred million acres of the Southern Plains were turning into a wasteland of the Dust Bowl. Large sections of five states were affected — Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.
In 1932, the national weather bureau reported 14 dust storms. The next year, they were up to 38. The dust was so thick that people scooped up bucketsful while cleaning house. Dust blocked exterior doors; to get outside, people had to climb out their windows and shovel the dust away. Dust coated everything.
Nevertheless, farmers kept on plowing, hopeful that the rains would return in a matter of days, or perhaps months. In the spring of 1934, the massive drought impacted 27 states severely and affected more than 75 percent of the country. The Dust Bowl was result of the worst drought in U.S. history.
As the farms literally dried up, farmers and their families from the southwest also moved to the cities to find work and food, and to escape the drought and dust. Like the rural Appalachian families a few years before, these displaced farmers created a second wave of impoverished people flooding the already stretched thin resources of the cities.