Welcome to HickoryRecord.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

HickoryRecord.com - Hickory Daily Record

HomeNewsEntertainmentSportsLifestylesOpinionCommunityWeather Online Tools Jobs | Real Estate | Shopping | Classified

Lessons last a lifetime

The ‘D word’ is back in use

Alan Rogers

Paul Speagle says his family was better off than most during the Great Depression. Both his parents kept their jobs.

Related Links

By Ragan Robinson | Hickory Daily Record

Published: November 29, 2008

HICKORY - The news is scary.

Americans are spending less. Banks are begging. Leaders of the nation's mammoth auto industry say they're running out of money. Experts predict 7.5 percent unemployment nationally by the end of the year. In Catawba County, we've already surpassed that. In the Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir Metro area in July, 8.6 percent of the labor force was out of work. That's the highest it's been in five years.

Recession is no longer the most frightening word in the economic dialogue. The "D word," depression, is sneaking into American consciousness on the backs of news stories and opinion polls.

There are people in and around Catawba County for whom the Depression is more than a phrase in the history books. It is a memory of cardboard in their shoes or strangers asking for food at the door.

Where we were

When the Great Depression struck, Catawba was one of the five richest counties in North Carolina, said Gary Freeze, who wrote the first two volumes of "The Catawbans" and teaches history at Salisbury's Catawba College.

Of course, Freeze said, the manufacturing barons were the ones making all the money. The countryside was not sharing in the prosperity.

The myth is that everybody was living off the land during the Depression, he said. The truth is that most Catawba County farmers didn't grow enough to feed themselves, or at least not enough to feed themselves well, and while lots of farmers still existed, many people in Catawba County were working in manufacturing.

Hickory alone had more than 100 plants, Freeze said. They included more than 20 hosiery mills. The Shuford family ran a cordage factory to make cords for windows. Southern Desk, Hickory Chair and Hickory Furniture were all big employers.

When no one could buy their products, the industrial base began to sag. Many manufacturing companies cut back on hours. Some closed for weeks at a time. Wages dropped.

"Very few people went belly up, but what you had was a constant crisis that impacted people from top to bottom," Freeze said.

Hickory had gone into massive debt in the 1920s to consolidate high schools and build more than a dozen new buildings. The county owed money for bridges and roads.

Meanwhile, the farmers who did exist could sell their crops, but the price was lower, Freeze said.

Cotton went from 30 cents a pound to 6 cents a pound. Tobacco dropped from 29 cents to 9 cents a pound, said Lenoir-Rhyne University history professor Mark Hager.

With everyone from the Shufords to the sharecroppers bringing in less money, the city and county couldn't collect all the taxes they were owed. Both had a hard time meeting their debt obligations.

Freeze said there was one day during 1932 or '33 when the word went out that Hickory wouldn't be able to pay a debt it owed for bonds. The day it was due, residents lined up at what would later become First National Bank of Catawba County, which handled the city account. People paid what they could of their taxes early, in some cases as little as a nickel, so the city could make its scheduled debt payment.

It was far from the only time people got creative.

Freeze said many Catawba County schools asked farmers whose children were students to bring food to the cafeteria. Those who did got a credit for their child's lunch.

Where we are

Today's Catawba County will be challenged by national and global economies, said Scott Millar, president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corp.

Among them could be major suppliers of the auto industry, including ZF Lemforder, which makes suspension assemblies with 150 to 175 employees in Newton, and Getrag in Maiden, a maker of machine parts that employs 500 to 600 people.

"I'm sure there will be suffering by individuals and companies in our marketplace," he said, "but the realities are that we have a pretty good promise from several different companies that have announced and are hiring either now or in the very near term."

He points to Convergys, hiring 446 people for customer service jobs; Turbotec Products, with 25 workers; Williams Sonoma's expansion to add 820 jobs; numerous positions at the Target distribution center; Poppelmann Plastics building a second building; Technibuilt with an expansion; MDI with 200 new jobs; and von Drehle Corp adding 31 workers.

The area's current economy doesn't compare with that of the 1930s, Millar said. But Catawba County's enterprising spirit is the same.

It showed up early in 1910 when local dairy farmers found a better way to make money with the Catawba Creamery, the largest operation of its kind, by 1915.

It showed up in 1954 when Hickory residents joined with the March of Dimes to build a polio hospital in 54 hours.

It showed up in the last decade, Millar said, when Hickory Chair, which has been around since before the Depression, saw trouble on the horizon and pioneered a process called lean manufacturing to run business more efficiently.

"I think we're a very self-reliant community and have a great work ethic," he said. "I think we're very creative and entrepreneurial. We fought our way back to health after the Depression and I think that we will do the very same things now. That's the constant, the mind-set behind the recovery."