Margaret Barrett: What things did your family do to get through the Great Depression?

MARGARET: We had chickens. My mother had chickens. And she would sell the eggs in town to the store to buy staples and um, whatever, meat at the butcher shop because we had dairy cows. We weren't butchering them. And things like that. And during the summer, she used to pick blackberries. In fact, all of us kids, we had several blackberry patches, wild blackberries. And she would sell them mostly to people in town. And in St. Charles, she had one customer in St. Charles who used to buy 10 gallons, $0.10 a gallon. That's what they paid her for a gallon of blackberries. And that's the way she got a little pin money. And of course, the cows and the dairy brought in the rest of our money. But they were always building up the herd, and buying food and feed for the chickens and the cows, and paying the hired man. And of course, they did have a mortgage on the farm. And they were, my mother especially was always worrying about paying the interest on the mortgage. But my dad had several jobs outside of the farm.

MARGARET: My mother made all our clothes. She made coats. She made all our dresses.

MARGARET: The chicken feed came in sacks that were made to be used as dresses. And she used those to make little cotton dresses for us children. And she used them as dishtowels and things like that. And also, then, feed for the cattle came in burlap sacks. And she made whatever she could out of that. She made mattress covers, and I think whatever she could use them for, she used those, too. But I was still wearing some dresses she made me, after I got married in 1940, that were made out of those sacks. And that's the way we survived.