By Dr. Charles Pendley

Contributing writer

The next series of articles will look at important events in Henry County during the years from 1920, when the county celebrated its 100-year birthday with parades, articles and civic pride while enjoying growth in both business, commerce and agriculture, to the 1970s, which ushered in the “Interstate era” and changed the county’s economy, travel habits and culture forever.

Let’s go back to the 40-year period between 1880 and 1920 when the county’s main source of wealth was a single crop: cotton. The arrival of the Georgia Midland and Gulf Railroad in 1886 brought McDonough back to life. Businesses, lawyers and newspapers moved their offices and even their houses from Hampton back to McDonough. Increased production and higher cotton prices led to unprecedented prosperity in the county. Cotton acreage in Henry County reached a peak in 1919 of over 66,000 acres. Cotton gins hummed with activity as wagonloads of the “white gold” waited in line for hours to be offloaded. However, this prosperity did not last, as we shall soon see, largely because of the damage caused by one little bug.

Among the most important events in the county during the half-century between the 1920s and the 1970s was the “boll weevil depression”, which devastated the county’s most important cash crop. The expansion of new textile and machine industries, the growth and importance of civic and religious organizations; the social upheaval and sacrifices of World War II, the old mules rendered obsolete by tractors, the decline of agriculture in the county’s economy, and the integration of the county’s public schools starting in the late 1960s were important events in Henry County at this time as well.

Few people alive today know what a boll weevil is. It is a small boring insect which invaded the South, including Henry County, and was brought from the west in the early 1920s and proved to be very hard to eradicate in spite of numerous campaigns that lasted until the 1960s. Efforts to fight the boll weevil included crop dusting with highly toxic chemicals such as arsenic and DDT, which unfortunately, in addition to the boll weevil, also killed many beneficial insects and animals.

The boll weevil feeds on cotton pollen, but does its damage by laying eggs on cotton flower buds or on the young developing cotton boll. The infected bud or boll stops developing and often falls off as the weevil’s larvae eat it.
The “boll weevil depression” in Henry County lasted from the early 1920s until the 1940s. The population of Henry County, which had been over 20,000 in 1920, had declined to around 15,000 by 1940. If the boll weevil was not enough, the financial crisis of the 1930s made a bad situation worse, adding to the county’s woes. Many banks closed, people lost their homes, farms, and businesses for lack of money and collateral to pay their debts. For many people in the county this was a period of “getting by,” of cars sitting on blocks because owners couldn’t afford to maintain them, and of just plain “hard times.” Sayings such as “another day, another dollar” became commonplace. People were forced to “make do or do without” Clothes were mended and holes in socks were darned. Flour sacks could be repurposed to make good dresses and families learned to live more frugally than ever before. Finding any job, even one that paid 25 cents an hour, was difficult.

If there is a silver lining in the boll weevil story, it is that many farmers were forced by the harsh circumstances to seek new sources of income from other crops like peaches, pimentos, grapes and wheat, going into dairying, raising cattle or leaving farms to look for work in the growing number of mills, foundries, and other industries in cities and towns throughout Georgia, the South, and as far away as Chicago and Detroit.

Henry County would not fully recover from the two depressions until the arrival of the war economy sparked by World War II arrived in the 1940s. But that will be the subject of another article.

This is a link to a very interesting article about the boll weevil depression in Henry County: https://www.henrycountyhistory .com/post/the-great-depression-in-henry-county