Looking back on the Great Depression in Cary makes me appreciate all that we have to be thankful for, even in today’s scary economy.

Clyde Evans Jr.: “I was here in Hoover’s time. We appreciated morning, noon and night the food you eat. You eat certain foods only on Sunday, a special day. My father would go help a neighbor. You would have a collection of people get together shucking corn, building ‘bacco barns or a house out of logs.”

Elva Templeton: “[During the Depression] I was teaching, and I had to wait from May until September to get my last month’s pay. And they reduced us forty dollars. Daddy, [Dr. Templeton] went out to see if he could get some money for gas. The woman said, ‘We’ll sell our place and pay you.’ He said, ‘No, you won’t either.’ He wouldn’t take anybody’s place for the world.”

Esther Ivey: “During the Depression, they had a cannery [at the school.] People could take their own vegetables up there and can them. We made preserves.”

Margaret Travis: “I was six years old when the Depression [started.] I heard the anguish of my parents. On my birthday, my uncle gave me one dollar. He said, ‘Put this in the bank and it will draw interest to help pay your way through college.’ I thought the dollar would multiply without limit. I seldom saw money at all. [Then the bank closed] and I lost my dollar. Oh dear me, I can’t go to college.

“I’d catch the school bus with the same pink dress on every day, but it was clean. We had just one dress apiece. Destitute in clothing. Everybody was poor.”

Bertha Pleasants Daniel: “The year that the Cary bank closed was ’29. My dad had always put a little money for each of us in there every year. It got all of our money. So far as I know, the small bank in Cary never paid off.

“A lot of people lost their jobs. My younger sister was seven years old [when my daddy died.] People didn’t pay the rent [on the farmland they rented from us], and my mother had it rough. We were self-supporting on the farm. You ate what you raised in your garden. A few families were really down on their luck. Their houses were pathetic to look at from the outside. But if you were sick and you needed something, your neighbor carried it to you. If you had a baby and you didn’t have anybody to help you, your neighbors went in and looked after you and took care of your children.”

Mary Crowder: “Daddy went to work with the WPA as a roaming superintendent. He’d leave on Monday and come back on Friday. Mother’s younger sister and her husband moved in with us. We grew our own vegetables. I didn’t grow up expecting a lot. As an only child, I didn’t have brothers and sisters to have to divide.”

Jerry Miller: “My daddy ran a funeral home in the Depression. People were so poor that he buried hundreds of them free. They would feed us hams and corn, something that they raised was the only way they paid. It so happened that he needed all those things to keep his children fed. So it worked OK. I never wore a new garment to school until I was a senior in high school. Everything I wore was hand-me-downs from my brothers above me. But I was dressed as good as anybody. It was not a fashion show like it is today. Roll our pants up about eight times till we got to the socks. Everybody else was in the same boat we were.”

Cary’s Heritage is taken from the book, Just a Horse-Stopping Place, an Oral History of Cary, North Carolina, which is on sale at the Page-Walker Hotel in downtown Cary. The book is a collection of oral history interviews conducted between local citizens and Friends of the Page-Walker Hotel. Proceeds from the sale of this book support the preservation of Cary’s history through the Cary Heritage Museum.