Farming by Hand

The earliest farming implements used in Louisiana were simple tools. Before tractors and other mechanized farm equipment changed the way people picked cotton, workers spent long hours in the hot Louisiana sun, chopping with hoes and digging with shovels. For cotton farmers in northeastern Louisiana, the years between 1900 and 1941 were generally marked by hardship because of the depressed cotton economy. As local historian Georgia Payne Durham Pinkston noted in the late 1970s, "one money crop was produced [locally] and that was cotton.” Low commodity prices, periodic flooding, and labor problems had plagued the local cotton industry during the post-Civil War era, but greater challenges awaited in he early twentieth century.

With the beginning of World War I (1914), Louisiana cotton farmers temporarily lost their European markets and prices plunged to 5 cents a pound. Following America's entry into the conflict, the federal government encouraged farmers to maximize agricultural productivity for the United States' war effort. The result, following the end of hostilities in November 1918, was a huge glut in commodities.

This produced a regional depression that gripped the Deep South throughout the 1920s. The local economic stagnation was compounded by the devastation wrought by the 1927 flood and the onset of the national depression in 1929. Economic hardship was generalized, and no segment of the regional population was spared.