Editor’s Note: Students enrolled in Western Illinois University Professor Greg Hall’s Illinois history seminar during the Fall 2025 semester each wrote 700-word summaries of their research papers about McDonough County history, and Dr. Hall generously provided these summaries to The Community News Brief. We will be publishing these over the next few months as part of McDonough County’s Bicentennial celebration coverage. We greatly appreciate Dr. Hall and his students for contributing to our historical retrospectives.
The Era of the Great Depression is well known for the intensity of the economic crisis that was faced throughout the entire country. While McDonough County was not alone in how it suffered through this time, the story of its perseverance is still unique in many ways. The focus of this paper will be on the county and the divisions within it.
That is, the division between the rural sections and the townships, primarily Macomb.
McDonough County was unique within the country because of its rapid and lasting community response - to the point where it was recognized by the United States Board of Commerce. While its story might be marked with occasional internal friction, the resilience of the community is remarkable.
The struggle of McDonough County’s residents is best seen through two lenses.
The first is the urban communities.Within the cities, the conditions were much different than those out in the farmlands.
Many residents relied on industry for their livelihood, and many lost that during the depression. Thus, aid here was arguably the most important, as there was the greatest number of people requiring, and fully reliant on, it. Still, the urban residents were both proud and resilient people, and they had no desire to have everything simply handed to them. Those who lost their jobs sought any place to work that they could find, including with the many federal agencies that came to offer aid. Additionally, the cities in McDonough County weren't nearly as large as those elsewhere. There was still plenty of arable land for them to work - and the victory gardens that sprung from that land were largely responsible for feeding everyone in the county.
The rural residents had a different situation. Farmers made far less money on their harvests, but they also still had a lot of food available to them. Rather than immediate supplies, most farmers had an issue handling debt. Many of them had mortgaged their lands or taken loans to buy more acres of land, only to find their harvests worthless.
Corn prices dropped as low as ten cents a bushel, and some farmers in more desperate need chose to burn their corn in place of coal, because it was cheaper. Still, the farmers were also very important in helping mitigate the depression, as they shared their knowledge with the city dwellers so that the gardens would flourish.
Conflict of course existed between these two groups. City dwellers argued that the Depression had hit them worse, and that they were in more dire need of funds.
Farmers argued that they had been waiting for years for their support, ever since the crop failures in 1924 and 1925, and they were tired of waiting. But at the end of the day, their community was a close knit one.
Neither side wanted to see the other suffer or go hungry. The kindness they showed to each other, and even the transients that they always made sure to feed, was in large the reason that their county emerged comparatively unscathed from those trying times.
