During the 1930s, Frank Conard and other trick photographers poignantly captured the surreal character of the natural disasters then plaguing the southern Great Plains through a series of humorous, exaggerated postcards. Their giant grasshoppers and other pests dwarfed the human world and underscored the “larger than life” character of such plagues. But when it came to dust storms, they did not need tricks (or humor) to convey the magnitude of the tragedy. Rising what seemed thousands of feet above the ground, monstrous clouds of dust rolled over the Plains between 1932 and 1936, blotting out the sun in midday and earning the nickname “black blizzards.” Conard and others photographed these clouds, leaving us a vivid reminder why the region became known as the Dust Bowl. Selected documents on the Dust Bowl in Kansas are now available on Kansas Memory.
Black Sunday occurred on April 14, 1935, when a ferocious dust storm bowled through western Kansas. Pauline Winkler Grey, of Meade County, describes her preparation for the storm, the sixty miles per hour winds, and standing in her living room in “pitch blackness” at midday in one volume of the Pioneer Stories of Meade County.
Like many people during the Dust Bowl, these Liberal, Seward County, residents wear face masks to help them breath during a dust storm. In an oral interview, John Stadler, of Stevens County, recounts how the masks would get so full of dust that you would have to take them off and beat out the dust.
This article from the Topeka Capital prints excerpts of a letter from teacher Gertrude Fay Doane of Winona, Logan County. Doane describes her experience with a dust storm during a school day. She tells how school closed early during the storm and the very next day school closed early again so the students could attend a rabbit drive.
The Kansas Historical Society holds many materials documenting the Dust Bowl in Kansas. A select number of these sources is now available on Kansas Memory.