As in the Civil War, so in World War I. The young farm hands went into uniform even as agricultural demand boomed. (We were helping feed France and Britain, as well as ourselves.) There was local agitation to create a Farm Bureau, which as we know was effective, and the Farm Bureau quickly set up tractor workshops. Farms mechanized, BUT the war ended unexpectedly in 1918. Farm prices crashed, and many farmers were now left struggling with time payments on their equipment.
*Then, at the same time, Prohibition came in! This closed the wineries and ruined the grape growers. We think of the Great Depression as starting in 1929. But for many farm families it started ten years earlier, in 1919. With widespread use of the motorcar, community and economic life began to dry up in the hamlets. They had had their own stores, schools, doctors, churches, undertakers. But who needed the little store in Coss Corners or Harrisburg Hollow when you could drive to Bath… or from Perkinsville to Wayland, Bloomerville to Avoca, Hornby to Corning? The rich man of Risingville now ran a shabby little shop in the sticks, with an outhouse in the back, and a kerosene lamp on the counter.
*This is the period in which thousands of Steuben people joined the Ku Klux Klan, which then as now exploited fear and turned it into hate by telling lies about people who are Not Like Us, and blaming THEM for all the trouble.
*When the Great Depression truly set in, one bright star locally (besides the evaporation of the Klan) was the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Charles Fournier came from France to revive Gold Seal with up-to-date practices. Taylor, which had eked its way through the dry years, expanded its operation, and new wineries opened. Every Labor Day growers and buyers met in Penn Yan to hammer out “the grape deal,” establishing prices that would be paid that year.
*This is also the period in which County Agent Bill Stempfle took the lead in reviving and modernizing potato production in the mucklands, bringing in growers from Maine and Long Island who were grateful to find lower land prices, and whose intensive farming practices could offset worn-out land. And, of course, there were New Deal programs to help the farmer.
*BUT this is the period in which the bill came due for almost 150 years of short-sighted land use practices… especially when catastrophic floods struck in 1935, 1936, and 1946. The ’35 flood, which killed 44 people regionwide, was in many ways far worse than the ’72 flood. One Avoca sharecropper in 1935 received as his share for the year one calf. Avoca became a pilot program for New Deal soil conservation practices. From this period we get diking and re-routing of the Conhocton and Canisteo Rivers, the Almond Dam, the Alfred Dam, tree plantations, drainage ditches… much of the work carried out by Civilian Conservation Corps lads from their main camp in Kanona.
*When the New Deal started, 10% of American farms had electricity. When it ended eight years later with the advent of World War II, 10% of farms did NOT. However, that 10% included Steuben County. R.E.A. got about 50 miles of wire strung before the needs for another world war cut off their materials. But demand for farm producrs, once again, went up… even as, once again, the prime workers were siphoned away.