What challenges did the Carters face when growing cotton as their main cash crop?
What were the many other crops raised by the Carters that contributed to a successful farm, and guarded against the volatility of cotton prices?
What livestock did the Carters raise?
What were the health and hygiene challenges that faced both farm workers and the livestock? We can learn from these health tips today.
RAISING CROPS AND LIVESTOCK IN RURAL GEORGIA DURING THE DEPRESSION
Jimmy Carter’s father was more prosperous than most farmers because he diversified as much as he could, always trying new crops, raising many varieties of livestock, packaging drinks to sell in nearby stores, and learning how to maintain his farm equipment in his small blacksmith shed. Mechanization of agriculture was limited in the years before World War II, farmers plowed the fields with mules and horses.
Cotton was the main cash crop in rural Georgia, though often bumper crops meant depressed prices. Cotton production shifted to the Western states that had fewer problems with the boll weevil pests, leading Georgia farmers in Plains to increasingly rely on raising peanuts, especially since the innovations of the black scientist George Washington Carver led to the invention of peanut butter and other uses.[1]
Jimmy Carter remembers how picking cotton was “back-breaking labor during the hottest time of the year.” “We moved slowly up and down the rows from when the heavy dew evaporated until sundown, bent over so we could reach the bottoms for the stalks, our fingers probing between the sharp burrs to pick each dangling lock of white seed cotton and cram it into long sacks that dragged behind us on the ground, suspended by straps that cut into our shoulders.”[2]
“Throughout the South, a century of concentration on cotton production depleted soil nutrients, and much of the topsoil was lost to wind and rain, often leaving bare subsoil in fields scarred by ever-deepening gullies. Most landowners had little if any money for improvements or adequate fertilizer, and many were just looking for a way out.”
When Earl Carter purchased such a tired farm, he would apply his knowledge of crop rotation by first thoroughly plowing the tired land, then planting it in vetch and clover to bring life back to the soil. They would repair the house, barn, and fences, and after working the land with tenant farmers or day laborers, he would sell the farm for a good profit.[3]
The Carters also raised corn, a major staple crop, as they often ate grits, cornbread, or corn on the cob.[4] The corn cobs and fodder were fed to their livestock. They also grew sweet potatoes, okra, peas, and greens, including collards, turnips, and cabbage. In early summer, they harvested wheat, rye, and oats.[5]
They raised milk cows, beef cattle, and brood sows, as well as growing the hay and fodder to feed them.[6] Most of their several dozen draft animals were mules, but they also kept half a dozen mares for fieldwork and riding, and to mate their jackass to produce mule colts. A few of their mules were leased out to their poorer tenant families.[7]
The Carter children milked their dozen cows twice a day,[8] and churned the milk to produce buttermilk and cream. They would sell some of the milk in flavored drinks they bottled for nearby stores, feeding what was returned and not consumed to the hogs and calves.
They had a yard full of chickens, plus geese, turkeys, and even some peacocks. Every year his father would order several hundred chicks from Sears or another supplier to raise for dinner or for resale. Throughout the year, Jimmy also picked plums, blackberries, cherries, blueberries, then figs, apples, and peaches, and then chestnuts, walnuts, pecans and other nuts and berries.[9]
During the first cold days of winter, the Carters would usually slaughter about twenty of their hogs, cutting up the carcasses into various cuts of meat and making sausages from the internal organs and intestines. Since there was no refrigeration, they gorged on pork for a few days. They cured and preserved much of the meat in their smokehouse, which took several days using special wood, including oak, hickory, and sassafras.[10]
Jimmy and his father also enjoyed hunting and fishing on their farm and adjacent woods. Many landowners didn’t want their sharecroppers competing with them for the game on their property, but Earl Carter was fairer. Jimmy remembers: “My daddy reserved only the bobwhite quail and morning doves for himself, leaving rabbits and squirrels to be hunted by those who lived or worked on our land. Almost universally permitted for tenants was the use of hounds at night to find racoons and opossums.”
Jimmy Carter remembers: “The time for fishing with other boys on the farm was when it was too wet to work in the fields and when the creek levels were rising. We would often camp out overnight on the stream bank, and fish in the increasingly muddy water for catfish and eels,” looking out for water moccasins.[11]
In their blacksmith and carpenter shop, they repaired and welded their farm equipment, manufactured simple implements, and shod the shoes of their horses and mules. Jimmy Carter learned how to build furniture, a hobby he continued in his retirement. Earl Carter even learned how to replace soles and heels on shoes.[12]
Life was hard for all farmers in rural Georgia, both black and white. Everyone in the Carter family encouraged their bright young Jimmy Carter to attend college, and then the Annapolis Naval Academy, and to join the Navy.[13] His young wife, Rosalyn, was quite disappointed when he resigned his commission to run the family farm after his father passed away.
We previously reflected on how Jimmy Carter described his transition from plowing with mules to commanding a nuclear submarine in his autobiography, and in the stories we heard in our guided tour of his Presidential Library. Most of these stories we did not repeat in this reflection.
Jimmy Carter’s Youth and Navy Years: From Plowing With Mules to Nuclear Submarines
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carters-youth-and-navy-years-from-plowing-with-mules-to-nuclear-submarines/
https://youtu.be/em5snF_iKkE
Jimmy Carter’s Youth, School Days, and Navy Days: Presidential Library Guided Tour 1 of 4
https://youtu.be/6rO9bh76PRc
HEALTH AND HYGIENE IN RURAL PLAINS GEORGIA
Although both blacks and whites experienced health and hygiene challenges during the Depression, poor health was more prevalent among black laborers and sharecroppers. Jimmy Carter remembers: “The life expectancy of black men and women was less than fifty years.” “During most of the year, they ate only two meals a day, usually cornmeal, fatback, molasses, and perhaps sweet potatoes. The more industrious families also had small gardens that provided some seasonal corn, Irish potatoes, collards, turnips, and cabbage, with a few rows of peas and beans planted alongside the garden fence. The combination of constant and heavy work, inadequate diet, and excessive use of tobacco was devastating to the health of our poorer neighbors.” His mother encouraged her black neighbors to grow vegetables in their own gardens, and shared with them the vegetables from the Carter family garden.[14]
Some of health problems faced by farmworkers in the Depression era have been lessened, but likely those who work outside on farms will always face more health risks than those who work mostly indoors in the cities. One common danger to both man and beast was sunstroke and heat stroke, which could be deadly. When plowing in the Southern heat, mules usually had enough sense to refuse to continue working when they were pushed to the limits of their endurance, becoming overheated, but horses were more likely to work themselves to death.
They called sunstroke the bear. Jimmy Carter remembers: “If someone quit sweating, his body temperature could almost immediately jump up five or six degrees, and death was a real threat. We knew to put such a man in the shade, pour our drinking water on his body, and rub his arms and legs.” He would be taken to the doctor, who would recommend that they rest for a week, “with no hard work in the fields.”
“Heat exhaustion was also a serious concern, but the symptoms of dizziness and nausea gave a few minutes advance warning before someone reached a critical stage. Cramps were another affliction,” which could be prevented by hydration and salt intake.
Jimmy Carter recalls: “My father was quite familiar with animal husbandry, and I learned from him how to treat problems like sours, mastitis, a calf reluctant to be born, and the dreaded screwworms.” He rarely needed the services of a veterinarian, but when he did, he usually employed their Uncle Jack Slappey. [15]
One of the most terrifying health risks was rabies. Everyone was strict about inoculating farm dogs against rabies, and all dogs were expected to have an inoculation tag attached to their dog collar.
One horror story that was told to young Jimmy was about a farmer bitten by a rabid dog. “While the farmer still had control of his senses, he secured himself to a tree with strong chains and a lock, and then threw away the key so that in the final stages of his derangement and convulsions he would not attack his wife and children.” He remembered: “During my childhood I saw several mad dogs.” “If one of our dogs began to act strangely, we would tie it securely or lock it in a crib, then shoot it unless it resumed its normal ways.”
When you were bitten by a dog, which was common, they would cut off the dog’s head and send it to the state laboratory for examination. If the dead dog was found to have been rabid, or if the dog could not be found, the victim would undergo a regimen of nearly two dozen shots which would hopefully avoid an inevitable death.
Farmers also had to worry about poisonous snake bites. The Carters had a pool dug on their farm so the children could swim, but they always had to be careful lest they be bitten by venomous water moccasins that could grow to a frightful size. Water moccasins were also a danger in the creeks they fished in. Once his cousin Hugh jumped into the pool with a water moccasin, but he “scrambled out so fast that he didn’t even get his clothes wet.”
Bare feet caused health challenges. Jimmy Carter often went barefoot from March to October, as did many of the men who worked the farms. This meant you had to be careful not to step on nails or rusty wires, as you could come down with tetanus, and you had to be careful not to slide your feet on wooden floors, lest you get splinters. Farmworkers had to watch out for ringworms, stubbed toes, wasp and bee stings, and ticks.
When Jimmy Carter visited the Clarks or other black families, he was often bitten by bedbugs hiding in “mattresses and pallets in their homes. This was a problem with all farm families, but Mama, as a nurse, seemed obsessed with keeping our place free of these pests. We put the legs of our beds in saucers of kerosene, and we carried our mattresses outside regularly to be beaten and sunned on both sides. We also scoured our house floors at least twice a year with a mixture of Octagon soap and the caustic Red Devil lye, to make sure that the cracks between the boards didn’t harbor insect eggs.”
The Carter family dumped their chamber pots in the outhouses they constructed, but many black and white families squatted in the bushes to relieve themselves. This primitive sanitation, and walking barefoot, led to widespread infections of hookworm in the American South.
Jimmy Carter remembered: “Almost everyone was afflicted from time to time with hookworm, which we called ground itch.” Dr Stiles, who discovered the hookworm parasite in the early twentieth century, realized that half to three-quarters of Southerners suffered from hookworms, which caused chronic anemia.
Jimmy Carter remembered, “Mama always put medicine between my toes, which prevented the parasites from migrating over time into my lungs, then my throat, and from there into my small intestines. Untreated, the millions of tiny worms consumed a major portion of the scarce nutrients within the bodies of our poorest neighbors.”[16]
Our main reflection on Jimmy Carter’s book, An Hour Before Daylight, includes Jimmy Carter’s recollections of how sharecropping worked in rural Georgia, unintended consequences of the New Deal, his memories of the hoboes who came to their door during the Depression, and how the civil rights struggles affected his black neighbors in Plains and Archer, Georgia.
Jimmy Carter, Memories of Sharecropping, Hoboes, New Deal, and Civil Rights in Rural Georgia
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-memories-of-sharecropping-civil-rights-and-life-in-rural-deep-south-georgia/
DISCUSSING THE SOURCES
If you are interested in learning what it was like to live on a farm in rural Georgia during the Depression, and how life was difficult for both the destitute black sharecropper and the landowning white farmer, then I would recommend Jimmy Carter’s book, An Hour Before Daylight, Memories of a Rural Boyhood. This book will transport you back to a different time and place. Long gone are the days when farmers plowed fields with horses and mules. Today farming is big business. When Jimmy Carter returned to his farm after his Presidency, he planted the less productive acreage in pine trees, and quite likely rented the more profitable farmland to large farmers who plow and harvest in air-conditioned combines.
We tried not to repeat too many of the stories Jimmy Carter told us in his autobiography he wrote when he was ninety, or in his Daily Devotions, or that we heard from our guided tour of his Presidential Library, so we encourage you to listen to these videos as well.
Jimmy Carter’s Youth and Navy Years: From Plowing With Mules to Nuclear Submarines
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carters-youth-and-navy-years-from-plowing-with-mules-to-nuclear-submarines/
https://youtu.be/em5snF_iKkE
Jimmy Carter Presidency, then Carter Center, Diplomacy and Charity
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-his-presidency-and-founding-the-carter-center/
https://youtu.be/sN3MQevsDa4
Jimmy Carter: Autobiographical, Historical, and Humorous Reflections From His Daily Devotions
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-autobiographical-historical-and-humorous-reflections-from-his-daily-devotions/
https://youtu.be/C2LPpDU7udY
Jimmy Carter Inspirational Daily Devotions: Bible Stories, Reflections on Historical Events
Jimmy Carter’s Youth, School Days, and Navy Days: Presidential Library Guided Tour 1 of 4
https://youtu.be/6rO9bh76PRc
Jimmy Carter, Georgia State Senator & Governor, Running for President: Presidential Library Tour, 2 of 4
https://youtu.be/6rO9bh76PRc
Jimmy Carter, Humble and Diligent President Facing Many Challenges: Presidential Library Tour, 3 of 4
https://youtu.be/GYqBplXHlcw
Jimmy Carter, Founding Carter Center After Presidency: Presidential Library Tour, 4 of 4
https://youtu.be/Z0CNaKpHEAc
There are also vignettes of what Christmas and life was like in rural Plains Georgia, both during the Depression and in the years after his Presidency. We decided to make this a separate video because of the charming story of Jimmy Carter’s favorite Christmas after he left the Presidency.
Jimmy Carter: Christmas in Plains Compared to Christmas in the White House and Afterwards
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-christmas-in-plains-compared-to-christmas-in-the-white-house-and-afterwards/
https://youtu.be/C52gRWUTR68
[1] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Memories of a Rural Boyhood (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2001), Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, p. 25.
[2] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, p. 181.
[3] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 8, Learning More About Life, p. 199.
[4] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, p. 25.
[5] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, p. 177.
[6] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, p. 27.
[7] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, p. 169.
[8] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, p. 37.
[9] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 4, My Life As a Young Pup, pp. 88-91.
[10] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, p. 172.
[11] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 4, My Life As a Young Pup, pp. 100-107.
[12] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, pp. 35-36.
[13] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, pp. 189-190.
[14] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 2, Sharecropping as a Way of Life, pp. 48-53.
[15] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, pp. 167-169.
[16] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 4, My Life As a Young Pup, pp. 77-93 and https://www.wondrium.com/turning-points-in-american-history, Lecture 32, The Scourge of the South, Hookworm.
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