I was born in 1934 in central Illinois right in the middle of the Great Depression. My mother worked the fields with my grandfather andmI was raised pretty much by my grandma. Went to a one room school from 1st grade through the 1st half of 6th grade. School had electricity but no indoor plumbing - outhouses out back of the school. One teacher, Miss Flickenger who taught 1st though 8th grades (and taught very well indeed) and we averaged about 10-12 students total. My grandparents (who raised me) moved to a town called London Mills where I entered the 2nd semester of the 6th grade. First time in my life that I took a shower since we only had a hand pump in the kitchen at our old farm. There bath time was a galvanized washtub in the kitchen with water heated on our old wood-fired cook stove, and that was once a week! Times were tough but we all worked to help out and we made it through. Looking back, I just wish my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren could have it as good today as I had it back then. Sure, we didn't have TV, just an AM radio that worked most of the time. Movies for 10 cents had news reels showing what was going on in the world, WW2 among other things, and there were always 2 cartoons shown before the actual movie. Good old days! No drugs, everybody had guns and never shot anybody unless they deserved it. (Usually!!)) Raised nearly all of our food and canned most of it. Butchered a hog and a steer at least once a year and cured the meat at home. Damn, I really miss those days.

Most people viewing these photos probably look at them as ancient history. At 80 years old I look at the photos as current events. I appreciate your good work on this project.. 😊 👍

i think it's important that images like this be captured and shared. It's interesting to see where we came from!

Most of those people were poor, yet very rich. Even though these pictures were before my time, they still remind me of my youth. We had more than most of these people, and yet there is something about it that takes me back.

I grew up in a ranching community in 1970’s. It was so familiar with the pictures. I first learned to drive at age 9 in a 65 Chevy and 1946 Ford truck. I always felt the 1940’s cars were not all that old. We spent about 14-17 hours a day working. The older men at church had fought in WW1. It was a hard but beautiful life. Church was the highlight of our week. Sunday and Wednesday nights were a 40 mile drive and school was a 50 mile drive. My classes had desks made in the 30’s and you could find your parents and grandparents in those who had graduated 8th grade years before at the same 3 room schoolhouse.

The "FSA" was the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program started in 1937 under President Roosevelt to target extreme poverty in rural America from the Great Depression. It supported jobs, training, conservation programs, self help food growing etc. Those were hard times.

People in the 1940's were far tougher than today. They did their part to help the war effort by using meager rations supplemented by what they could grow or hunt. These are the grandparents/great grandparents that still wash and reuse aluminum foil today because of lessons learned when life was hard. With war rationing in the 1940's per week consisted of: This is a typical weekly food ration for an adult: Bacon & Ham 4 oz Other meat (equivalent to 2 chops) Butter 2 oz Cheese 2 oz Margarine 4 oz Cooking fat 4 oz Milk 3 pints Sugar 8 oz Preserves 1 lb every 2 months Tea 2 oz Eggs 1 fresh egg (plus allowance of dried egg) Sweets 12 oz every 4 weeks

Wow, when families stayed and worked TOGETHER!!! No distractions, no internet, OR CELL PHONES!!!! They were great days!

Seeing all the canning jars and pressure cooker brings back a time for me with my Father canning vegetables from his garden. I still do this today, 68 years old and have a good supply of food.

The inner strength and character of those people in these photos reinforces the notion that they were the Greatest Generation, Looked hard but saw no fat folks in these pictures. I certainly hope the descendants of these folks are as resilient as this generation was or these could be photos of the future.

An amazing collection of rural Americana photos from the 194O era: very good!

We look back at times like these with a certain nostalgia. What we don't realize is that in 60-80 years, people will look back at the time we're living in right now the same way.

Hey! The Caribou, Maine potato picker? We did that as kids! Hired out to a local farmer, picked potatoes in a basket like this one, hoisted them from the ground to the top of the barrel and emptied the basket. When the barrel was full, we were all given “tickets” that had a number on them, each person had a different number assigned to them, so we could be paid for every barrel picked (about 50 cents a barrel in the 1970s). We got up before sun rise, the farmer had a bus or pickup truck to pick us up and deliver us to the potato field where they were digging with a tractor and a “digger” attached that would dig two rows at a time. The farmer paced out a section he figured we could pick and keep up with, and we were responsible for that area as long as we were in that field. We knew our picking territory because it was marked with a section stick the farmer would gather from the bushes to give to us to mark our place. Hard work, great memories, and it taught us so much about responsibility and economics, as we bought school supplies and Christmas presents with the money we earned (putting stuff we hoped to purchase on lay away and paying it off as we earned the money). Yup - school let us out for 3 weeks every Fall to help get the harvest in. There should be a course in school for this called potato picking 101 - best way to learn many valuable and practical things!

Very Sad to consider that almost every person in those photos has passed on . Life is but a vapor. Thank you for putting this video together .

Photos came close to home for me, born in 1939 in red hill country of SC. Know what poverty is like. Hardworking people finally climbed out of the economic hole pretty much in the 1960s from my observation.

My father worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps when he was young. They need to bring that back.

And people complain today of hardships. Really? We have been ,for the most part, very fortunate.

Good pics. We were still cooking sorghum like that up into the early 60’s in East Tenn.

Back then they worked hard was for the most part happy, family was the most important part of their lives. They knew no different but willing to work hard for what they had unlike today.

I was visiting friends in Castleton VT a week ago. This was the only other reference I've ever seen to that town. I was born in 1947 at a farmhouse with no electric service and a hand water pump in the kitchen in Conn. Not everyone knows there were still houses like that then.

My late wife would have loved to see the hay stacker photo taken in Caldwell Co. Idaho. She grew up on her grandparents farm in near Nampa in the late 1930s.

I loved those photos. Both my parents were kids back then in Mississippi and Georgia and those pics could've been taken of their lives.

Still have some "Atlas" square canning jars in use today! Love the Pressure canner!

I enjoyed the video! It's very telling. I was moved by the road signs, the families gathered round the tables-where was the woman of the house in the photo where the table was full of stair step children and a man? Perhaps she didn't want to be in the photo, or she had died in childbirth? One other picture stood out-the two boys carrying their lunch pails. I think it's the stark contrast with the other children, shoeless and wearing tattered clothes. Thank you YTT for this thoughtful collection. God bless..

This was very informative, thought provoking and interesting. Nice music as well. Thank you.

I am so addicted to this channel.

Awesome video. Thank you for sharing and the time and effort you put in to each one of these .

Thanks for the great pictures!

That brought back a bunch of memories.

Thank you. Enjoyed this immensely.

Many thanks for this excellent video.

This used to be a damn good country.

I found this channel quite by accident and I'm glad I did. Just subbed.

Can’t get enough of them GREAT

I love seeing this video showing the history of the past keep it up

My grandfather was born in Breathitt County, KY. By the time that photograph was taken in 1940, it was called Wolfe county because of it's infamous name Bleeding Breathitt from all of the feuds including political assassination's.

Outstanding work on this video!

Your music to these pictures is so relaxing and lets you sink into the Places so long ago Love your videos

Boy times were tough back then poor kids dont have shoes to wear

I loved this, thank you

Great photos of real life! Thank you.

Nicely done, thank you.

Keep up the amazing work i really hope your channel gains alot of success

Thank you!

Reminds me of growing up in the Ozark hills. Very familiar. Thanks.

Very interesting. I would like to see more pictures of South Georgia back then. Please

Thank you.

Thank you

No fat kids, and probably getting a better education than today (4:27). Not spending time worrying about whether they were binary, or what their preferred gender pronoun was.

These are called surviving real poverty. The next step down is starvation.

OMG. I can't even imagine how much work it was to do all that canning. @10:12. Good Lord. The Millers were a force!

Excellent photographs.

Really interesting. At least a couple photos were taken in my home County, Caswell Co., NC.

Enjoy very much thank you

The photo at 1:20, reqlly hits home. We had the exact same stove as long as I can remember. It was Grandmothers, when the folks married and built a new house ( Old farm house was small and decrepid) , that old cook stove moved along too. Served well till the electric range was bought in the early 50s. Old cook stove moved into the basement wash room and was used for heating wager for the Maytag wringer wash machine, and for canning. Was used there till I moved out and married in the 70s. Stove still is in that house till brother abandoned the house and let it fall in. Hope to see if I can recover the stove this summer, restore it and use it here for stand by when power or fails or LP is unavailable these days!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I live in Nashville. I worked with a young lady ( in the '80's ) that grew up in Caribou Maine. She told us about getting out of school to go work in the potato fields when she was growing up. I really liked the last picture of the hunters.

My old Kentucky home. Thanks.

And to think we have a hard life???? We are not that close to what these pictures show.

This channel always plays the best music

Always great pictures and perfect background music that ads to the emotion and longing for a simpler time. What is the music you use?

Most of these scenes made me feel sad that they didn't have shoes and their clothes, in many cases, were just rags. The "Land of Opportunity" seems to have passed them by.

These folks lived a hard life.

So many people without shoes. It makes me wonder if they ever got comfortable walking and didn't mind it or whether their feet caused them serious problems as time passed. I can't imagine not having shoes.

I CAN DIG IT!

I was looking for all the white privilege that I keep hearing about still didn't see it

would have been sooo much better without captions obscuring the photos

These old photos really bring an overwhelming feeling for me. But the music gives me such an overwhelming Deja vu I have been searching for the composer can you give me the name.

Too much prosperity and idleness leads to the downfall of civilization.

Homesteading is disappearing, glad my wife learned gardening,hunting,fishing,canning from her grandparents. Will never sell the farms.

Oh, and just to add, my Granny's house, where I grew up, had a well, for clean and tasty spring water, fortunately, because our neighbours, who like us had no mains water supply, had to walk a quarter of a mile to the village pump, to get drinking water, unless they paid a local farmer, with a horse and cart to take and bring back buckets two or three times a week. You forget these things. I went to school in a neighbouring village four miles away across the fields, I did get a lift though, like 'rerun, in the Snoopy cartoon, on a seat on the back of mum's bike.

Lots of Shorpy worked photos all wrapped up in one video. Good exposure for the site.

I’d seriously trade right now and go back there to live..

Probably the majority of these photos show people who would have been described as poor, poor in a way that people now would have a hard time grasping. My dad grew up in rural Texas during this era and like many others the family lost their land to the bank when prices dropped too low for them to be able to make payments. Yet you don't see the squalor and degradation that you see nowadays at the bottom of the ladder. People had a resourcefulness that's been lost, along with a sense of self-pride that's very different from today's "self-esteem." Drug use and government assistance replacing family and community obligation changed all that. Ironically the well-intentioned folk you see in the pictures checking on conditions in rural schools and giving pressure cookers to farmers' wives helped bring about this destruction. Those students were probably better educated and the housewives ran better households than their descendants today, but at least now they have TV and smartphones so there's that.

Look at Mosquito Crossing GA in Google maps. That gas station from 0:27 is still there!

I was born in Britain in 1944. There were people in my village who had no shoes, or just one pair for Sunday and a pair of rubber boots for when the rain and mud got too much. (Not warm like Georgia!) However, by the time I was six, even the poorest families had shoes, but second-hand clothes were valued, and if you had a yard (garden) you grew food rather than flowers, and although we had rations, 1 egg per person per week, meant keeping a few chickens was a necessity. I feel fellow feeling for the rural poor of 30's and 40's America, please don't think that Europe was full of well fed lords and ladies.

Does anyone know who the composer is of this music. I’ve been trying to find out

*Anybody know whatever happened to the 'YESTERDAY TODAY' channel?*

7:08 might be still there.

These pictures do NOT need any comment other than their location.

Ah caint believe thay ain't no picture of a pack of hounds what got a raccoon cornered in a tree. Them days we was eating us some right nice coon sausage and hams as well as just plain old roasted up whole raccoon carcass. Caint say as they make a decent gravy, but the meat is right tasty and moist. Fact is fresh caught meat was a staple for most of the families in our holler. We done alright on the odd deer, a passle of coons and possums, some snared up rabbits, and a few squirrels. Granny could cook up pretty near anything we catched, including water snakes, turtles, and crows, and make it taste delicious. You don't get a variety of food like that these days.

Nice old photo! But, please can you change the canned music!?!?

Do you know what "FSA" was?

War brings death, gee 😎

I am from breathitt county the swimming hole is Prater rock

These photos are pretty ordinary.

i've got pics from the 1920's and 30's.

Pics--great, but lose the silly titles...

Well it wasn't the anus of the Earth, but you could certainly see it wasn't far from these areas.

Beautiful White America.... Times Have Changed

OH , America with NO social programs and 10% taxes

The thought of foolishness is sin. Then it looks like Congress is in big trouble.😂

I didn't se any grafitti on the walls. I thought it was poverty that brought that on. I guess these people are tooo busy trying to survive. No guvmnt handout for the lazy back then.

Can the distracting lousy soundtrack, silence allows the photos to speak.

If the breathitt ssuperintendent was alive today and seen the state of American schools today he would be aghast. Especially with the violence and push for the transgender movement...

Who is the bringer of death ?? Why it's our old pal Robert Oppenheimer.😄

It must have royally fuckin' sucked to be native american, black, latino, gay or lesbian in those days...

Could have done without the religious 🐂💩.

I'm still trying to figure out why did poor families keep making so many kids. They were like rabbits. Still do too. Why do poor families keep popping out babies. Do they think that tax check will make them rich.