Pop on down to the Wallace for our very first “Pop-Up Museum!” sponsored by the Hockley County Historical Commission.
The Exhibit is free to the public. Open hours will include:
Tuesdays and Thursdays May 25th, 27th, June 1st & 3rd 11:00am-6:00pm,
Saturday, May 22nd 1:00pm-4:00pm,
Saturday May 29th 10:00am-2:00pm.
Book your own special viewing for a class or group by emailing the Wallace at Wallace@WallaceTheater.com or call 806-789-9097.
Join us for a special closing dinner on Thursday, June 3rd. Tickets available here.
The display will feature 10 projects created by Levelland Middle School Students, an exhibit from Humanities Texas, and Ken Burns Documentary “THE DUST BOWL” will be screened in the auditorium throughout our open hours and is on loan from the Museum of Texas Tech University.
Student projects include:
Georgia McMahan & Ryan Jeanneret- Economic Failure of the Great Depression & Dust Bowl
Azure Wheeler- Keeping Out of The Muck: How the People of the 1930s Managed the Dust
AnnaLee Napier- Psychological Impacts of the Dust Bowl
Luke Johnson- The Dust Bowl & the Science of Soil
Nathan Ellis- Static Storms: Static Electricity in the Dust Bowl
Zaden Carrillo & Jayden Moreno- The Machines that Caused the Dust Bowl
Trinity Wafer- A Child's View of the Dust Bowl
Sydnii Joyce- Stretching to Survive: Cooking in the Dust Bowl
Ada Niederhauser-- When You Can't Afford Clothes: Feedsack Fashions of the Dust Bowl
Mollie Clowe- Housekeeping in the Dust Bowl
From Humanities Texas: Striking at the depth of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl blasted the hopes and hard work of people in the Great Plains. For those who lived through it, the experience was unmatched as an example of ecological calamity and a test of personal will. Today it is difficult for younger generations to comprehend what happened, but The Dust Bowl can bridge the gap between generations and promote understanding of the pioneering will to prevail in the face of immutable laws of nature.
Exhibition
In the 1930s, photographers working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) captured unforgettable images of human fortitude in the face of despair. Nebraska photographer Bill Ganzel set out in the late 1970s to find and re-photograph Dust Bowl survivors for a book and exhibition. The Dust Bowl combines FSA photographs and Ganzel’s interviews to create an eloquent story of human perseverance. Panel topics include:
Dust storms, blasted crops, and abandoned farms in the Great Plains
Displaced men, women, and children
Heading west
Staying put
4-H Clubs, WPA, and other government programs
Country schools
Changes through time
The Dust Bowl is an exhibition organized by the Nebraska Council for the Humanities in collaboration with Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Photo above: Heavy black clouds of dust rising over the Texas Panhandle, March 1936, LC-DIG-fsa-8b27276 (digital file from original negative). Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
About the documentary “THE DUST BOWL” by Ken Burns
THE DUST BOWL chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, when a frenzied wheat boom on the southern Plains, followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s, nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Menacing black blizzards killed farmers' crops and livestock, threatened the lives of their children, and forced thousands of desperate families to pick up and move somewhere else.
Vivid interviews with more than two dozen survivors of those hard times, combined with dramatic photographs and seldom seen movie footage, bring to life stories of incredible human suffering and equally incredible human perseverance. THE DUST BOWL, a four-hour, two-episode documentary from acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, is also a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us - a lesson we ignore at our peril.
Episodes include…
The Great Plow Up - In the early twentieth century, thousands of homesteaders and ""suitcase farmers"" converge on the southern Plains, where wet years, rising wheat prices and World War I produce a classic boom. Millions of acres of virgin sod are plowed up. Caroline Henderson stakes her claim in a strip of Oklahoma called No Man's Land, and for a while prosperity seems certain for her and the families of two dozen survivors who provide eyewitness testimony. Then, in 1931, a decade-long drought begins, exacerbated by the Great Depression. Huge dust storms carry off the exposed topsoil and darken the skies at midday, killing crops and livestock. ""Dust pneumonia"" breaks out, threatening children's lives. And just when it seems things could not get any worse, in 1935 the most catastrophic dust storm in history strikes on ""Black Sunday.""
Reaping the Whirlwind - Following ""Black Sunday,"" the crucible of dust, drought and Depression only intensifies. Many people on the southern Plains, including an itinerant songwriter named Woody Guthrie, give up and join a ""migration of the defeated"" to California. There they are branded as ""Okies"" and face vicious discrimination. Meanwhile, Caroline Henderson and her neighbors struggle to hang on to their land. Franklin Roosevelt's administration attempts to help them through New Deal programs aimed at preventing the breadbasket of America from becoming a Sahara. Survivors recount their families' desperate times, their joy at the rains' return, and the lessons learned - and sometimes forgotten - from the Dust Bowl.