The year 2020 has been a difficult time for Hopkins, with the COVID-19 virus and its financial impacts sweeping the county’s approximately 30,000 residents. However, although citizens struggle, they continue to express they feel blessed to live in Hopkins. When recounting 2020 and thinking forward to the coming holidays and the year ahead, Hopkins County can draw strength from previous historical events and the sense of community that led them through.
A LOOK BACK ON HARDSHIP
The Great Depression, which struck the US from 1929 through 1939, primarily affected Hopkins County from the years 1931 to 1935, according to historical documents and first hand accounts.
As an economy based on the commodities cotton farming, cattle, milk canning and brick-making, Hopkins was isolated from the first years of the Depression. Yet by early June 1931, the national shortage of cash flow meant the “railroads were dismally run and the Cotton Belt [was] crippled,” according to the News-Telegram.
For a county that relied on the railroad strongly, county folk felt the depression acutely. Farmers began to be unable to purchase supplemental feed for their cattle. The US Department of Agriculture sent agents to Hopkins to buy cattle at a federally determined price in order to help Hopkins farmers. The cattle were then taken to slaughter and buried in the rural areas of Hopkins, as federal agents would not allow them to be butchered and resold.
“We begged the man with tears rolling down our faces, as us kids hadn’t had anything but dried peas to eat for months,” Sulphur Springs citizen Willie Dixon wrote. “The government men said they had orders to destroy the meat. I can’t believe they had the men cover up the cows when people were going hungry!”
During this same time, many of the more rural schools in Hopkins were shut down for good due to lack of funding and low attendance. Hopkins County historian Ila Ruth Reasonover remembered her transfer from White Oak School to Sulphur Springs Junior High. The other girls poked fun of her for riding in on the “chicken coop,” their word for the school bus, she said, as she did not live close enough in town to walk to the building on Connally Street.
At the same time, the debilitating Dust Bowl rippled through East Texas. The year 1934 was the driest on record to this day, going 59 days with no rain from Sept. 7 to Nov. 5, according to US Farm Bureau data. Cotton bolls were barely nubbins, rows of corn failed to germinate, and once-famous watermelons sat bleached and half their normal size in the parched fields, Reasonover remembered.
In Sulphur Bluff, citizens took suspiciously but hopefully to listen to the sales pitch of traveling peddlers who sold madstones, according to Hopkins County historian P.T. Hare. The stones could supposedly alleviate bites of venomous snakes, rabid dogs, and help douse water. Although citizens believed little in the mystical powers of the egg-sized stones, which could sometimes fetch up to $1,000, at that point they were desperate to try anything as great clouds of dust blew in from Oklahoma and the Dakotas and ravaged Hopkins’ crops.
Finally, on the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, the skies in Hopkins opened up and the county received proper rain. However, Hopkins was not done with hardship yet. The area would remain economically depressed until World War II sparked manufacturing industries.
STILL BLESSED
Congressman Wright Patman, in his weekly News-Telegram column, had some sage advice in 1953 as he remembered the Great Depression era: “As much as we can talk ourselves into a depression, we can talk ourselves out of it… it was a great challenge and the cooperation of every American, regardless of politics, was needed.”
While firsthand accounts of the time painted a bleak economic picture, they also celebrated what Hopkins has always held so dear: family togetherness and personal resourcefulness.
In Sulphur Bluff, the shops propped their candies and stuffed toys in the storefronts a week before Christmas for children to examine, and stores stayed open late on Christmas Eve so parents could pick up their sacks for Santa. After opening presents on Christmas morning, boys would gather in the street for their roman candle war, perhaps culminating in general roughhousing, Sulphur Bluff citizen Bud Patty recalled.
At Weaver, school the children still put on their Christmas program with carols and the Christ child story, an announcement in the News-Telegram notified readers.
Reasonover remembered Christmas in Sulphur Springs, clutching one dollar bill tightly in her mittened hand as she peeked into the shops on the square. A wreath hung in every store window, and colored lights, tinsel and garlands of greenery were fastened to the light poles, just as they now adorn Celebration Square for onlookers.
While Christmas during the Great Depression meant each family member received a present that cost a quarter or less, the town still sparkled with holiday magic and the courthouse was still aglow with that special incandescence that only wintertime in Hopkins can bring.
“In Hopkins County, we always rally together,” said Pastor Joel Tiemeyer, Fire Station 20 Chaplain. “We always have a community, whether it’s celebrating in the square or the churches handing out Thanksgiving meals to families in need.”
“It’s the sacred things that we remember and continually do over time that keep us strong and that we will pass along to the next generation,” Tiemeyer noted. “These are our great values and qualities that we love about our community.”