Faith and the Dust Bowl
As the winds of the Plains whipped across the lands, huge clouds of dust were stirred up burying roads and homes. Tons of soil blew off the barren lands in clouds that traveled for hundreds of miles. These dust storms, also called “black blizzards,” reached heights of 10,000 feet and wind speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. The dust storms traveled as far as New York City before the moving cloud of topsoil dropped into the nearby Atlantic Ocean.
By 1935, almost 100 million acres of farmland throughout the Plains no longer had enough topsoil to grow crops. 2.5 million farmers, on the edge of financial ruin, only added to a country already in the midst of a Great Depression. Farmers unable to pay their mortgages simply packed up and left without notice and their actions would had a ripple effect on the nearby bankers and small town merchants.
As the winds of the Plains whipped across the lands, huge clouds of dust were stirred up burying roads and homes. Tons of soil blew off the barren lands in clouds that traveled for hundreds of miles. These dust storms, also called “black blizzards,” reached heights of 10,000 feet and wind speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. The dust storms traveled as far as New York City before the moving cloud of topsoil dropped into the nearby Atlantic Ocean.
By 1935, almost 100 million acres of farmland throughout the Plains no longer had enough topsoil to grow crops. 2.5 million farmers, on the edge of financial ruin, only added to a country already in the midst of a Great Depression. Farmers unable to pay their mortgages simply packed up and left without notice and their actions would had a ripple effect on the nearby bankers and small town merchants.
