Texas News

These Vivid Photos Show Texas During The Great Depression And Wartime

KERA | By Eric Aasen

Published December 26, 2014 at 4:40 PM CST

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This farmer grew corn in Kaufman County in 1936.

Arthur Rothstein / Library of Congress

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In 1942, 20-year-old Beulah Faith worked at Consolidated Aircraft Corp. in Fort Worth. She had been a sales clerk in a department store.

Howard R. Hollem / Library of Congress

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This picture of a child of a day laborer was taken in 1937 in Ellis County.

Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress

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In 1937, this family was going to church in Ellis County.

Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress

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A roadside stand and filling station in Ennis in 1937.

Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress

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The courthouse in Weatherford in 1939.

Russell Lee / Library of Congress

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At the copy desk at The Dallas Morning News in 1943.

John Vachon / Library of Congress

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Downtown Dallas in January 1942.

Arthur Rothstein / Library of Congress

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In Dalworthington Gardens in 1936.

Arthur Rothstein / Library of Congress

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A roadside sign on West Lancaster Avenue in Fort Worth.

Arthur Rothstein / Library of Congress

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A boy in Kaufman County in 1936.

Arthur Rothstein / Library of Congress

During the Great Depression, photographers fanned out across the country to capture the United States. Some of them visited Texas, snapping thousands of pictures.

The photographers continued taking pictures during the early 1940s, when the country was focused on World War II.

A team at Yale University has produced a cool site that allows you to look at the photos from the Library of Congress, county by county, across the country.

Scroll down to look at some of the pictures from Texas -- and click on the slideshow above. The pictures range from the bright lights of downtown Dallas to folks driving to church in the country -- from women making tortillas to farmers picking corn and cotton.

About the pictures

From Yale’s Photogrammar:

The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) produced some of the most iconic images of the Great Depression and World War II and included photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein who shaped the visual culture of the era both in its moment and in American memory. Unit photographers were sent across the country. Of the 170,000 photographs in the collection, approximately 88,000 were printed and placed in the filing cabinets of the FSA-OWI.

Dallas County