New in Town

How much do you know about the Great Depression? Big things stand out, no doubt: the stock market crash, Prohibition, the New Deal. But what was life like for regular Americans who lived in, say, Washington state?

The Appelo Archive Center in Naselle, Wash., helps answer that question with its free exhibit Hope in Hard Times: Washington During the Great Depression. The exhibit is part of a traveling program presented by Humanities Washington and the Washington State Historical Society. You can see the exhibit for yourself 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays until it closes on Saturday, Oct. 5. The Naselle Timberland Library and the Appelo Archive Center will also present The Civilian Conservation Corps, a film in the PBS series The 1930s at 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28.

Interesting information abounds in the exhibit. For example, though the national (and global) economy plummeted in 1929, Washington states economy had been hit hard ever since the end of World War I: Many jobs, such as logging, derived from national resources, and when wartime high demand decreased, so did peoples incomes.

Hope in Hard Times is centered around a series of interpretive panels that slowly tell the story of what Washingtonians went through. While the panels are text-heavy, the room surrounding them is full of objects and items that illustrate history. One section is completely devoted to quilting, which experienced a resurgence during the Depression because people had to be industrious with every scrap of fabric.

The small exhibit would be a fun place to take kids. There are a lot of attention-grabbing visual examples that can start conversations about history. One display case houses everyday items from the 1930s alongside their modern equivalents: salt and pepper shakers, curling irons, hairdryers a typewriter, camera, map, record, greeting card and address book next to a cellphone.

What perfectly illustrates the heart of the exhibit is the question, Are things different now from how they were then?

The answer is more nuanced than you might think at first. While on the surface things seem very different technology has changed a lot, for one the exhibit also subtly points out similarities: polarized political parties, economic concerns, failing banks, job layoffs, housing foreclosures. Washingtons unemployment in the 1930s was 33 percent; in 2011 it was 9 percent. A big difference, but the exhibit points out that social safety nets like food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security which many people used during the modern Great Recession were all created in the wake of the Great Depression. Overall, the exhibit wants to start a conversation about these topics, or at least get you thinking about them. It places the present alongside history, asks you to step back and observe.

My favorite part of the exhibit is the Depression-Era Story Board, where visitors are encouraged to write a note and share their own memories or a family members stories of the Depression and how it affected them. A lot of the handwritten notes talk about being frugal and thrifty: People recalled how their mothers or grandmothers would make clothes out of flour sacks and dishcloths out of string. Several people mentioned how men would knock on the door and ask for food in exchange for any work that needed to be done. Mothers would inevitably cook a meal for the stranger and send him on his way. Even when people are poor, they still share what little they have. That held true in 1933, and it still hold true today, in 2013.