Barbara Barden Margerum

Homeless on the Range: Life on the Road in a Model a Ford Barbara Barden Margerum

This is a story of a family's odyssey during the darkest days of the Depression, a time when one fourth of the nation's work force was unemployed, when farmers not only lost their farms, but their topsoil as the most severe drought in decades spread across the Great Plains and turned much our productive land into a giant Dust Bowl. From 1929 to 1933 unemployment soared from 3.2% to 24.9% Banks failed, and people's savings of a lifetime were wiped out. Bleak statistics, but to a young couple, Hugh Halstead Barden and Ruth Andres Barden and their four year old daughter, Barbara they were the realities of a day to day struggle to live.