Throughout the 1930s, winds picked up swirls of dust from overplowed farms and blanketed communities across the vast Great Plains in layers of dirt. Storms like these characterized life for millions of residents in the region, comprising 10 states through the middle of the U.S. The environmental upheaval paired with the nation’s economic downturn led many occupants to flee, but a vast majority of locals opted to stay put. To block out the dust, infants slept with wet sheets above their cribs, and the Red Cross distributed masks to protect locals from “dust pneumonia.”
From 1900 to 1930, the amount of farmland in the Great Plains region had tripled, leading farmers to quickly adopt mechanized equipment to till soil. This overworking of the land turned disastrous in 1931, when drought struck and catastrophic winds began.
The worst of the storms in the Texas Panhandle, known as Black Sunday, occurred on April 14, 1935. Now known as a “black blizzard,” the muddy storm destroyed buildings, cut power, and displaced thousands of tons of soil. “We couldn’t believe it, just rolling in like a freight train,” Gayle Bowen, who grew up in Post during the Dust Bowl, said in a 2014 Texas Highways article. “We had seen many a dust storm, but this was fearful.”…