1934 … darkness falls across America …

Families were driven out of the once fertile Great Plains by massive dust clouds–one that rose to 10,000 feet and reached as far as New York City.

A dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935

On May 9th, 1934 a giant storm rose up out of the great plains. A menacing wall of soil and dust headed east across the land, thick enough to block out the sun.

Buried machinery in a barn lot; Dallas, South Dakota, May 1936

A farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936