Student Work
Mississippi’s Head Start into Hard Times
By: Clint Tisdale
Struggles in Mississippi
During the Great Depression, people across the country were in dire need of work of any kind to provide for themselves and for their families. The stock market had crashed and unemployment was at an all time high, so people relied on credit to purchase the bare necessities for survival. This can be exemplified for Mississippi, and Oxford specifically, in Ledger #38 from the Neilson’s Department Store archives; as the pages show, everyone who made a purchase during this time used either credit, or their personal account with Neilson’s. On one page in the ledger, there is an amount for all the accounts combined that needs to be paid that is tallied up to over $40,000 — this total shows how much people were relying on credit and how their economic situation made businesses struggle by asking them to trust their customers to pay back their accounts.
One of the possible reasons for the Depression hitting Oxford could have been due to an overproduction of cotton by farmers, which this is seen as one of the reasons for the Great Depression starting across the nation Depression.”[1] People were willing to take any job that they could find here in Oxford, no matter what the pay was, to try to afford to survive. Neilson’s Department Store still strove to provide for the people of Oxford, stating this on their website: “During the Great Depression in the 1930’s, Neilson’s store survived by careful management and loyalty of its employees. It was able to help customers on the University and County School faculties by taking assignments of paychecks when the State of Mississippi could not honor them for lack of funds. Neilson’s also honored IOU’s issued for deposits in local banks, and carried charges by customers who were unable to pay.”[2] “No town was spared the economic hardships associated with it and few jobs were to be had in Oxford. If work was available the wages were sometimes as low as ten cents per hour.”[3] Another source tells of how dire the situation had really become for Mississippi as a whole when the Depression hit; “Mississippians were dirt poor even before the Depression struck. Six of every 10 lived on farms, and of those, 65 percent did not own their land. Their poverty stemmed from a system of sharecropping and tenant farming devoted to one-crop agriculture (cotton), which led to soil depletion.”[4]
These various accounts show how Neilson’s Department Store provided for the people of Oxford in every way that they could, even though the nation was in a period of economic turmoil. It also represents the kind of a reputation Neilson’s Department Store made, from the ways it helped people in Oxford during the 1930s, to being a lasting staple of the Oxford square today. The sources showed how it wasn’t just Oxford that was having a hard time of surviving the Depression as a city and as a people, Mississippi as a whole was having a hard time coping with not being able to find work and not having money to afford the necessities to live day to day.
Ledger 38, December 12 1929 from Neilson’s Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, The University of Mississippi Libraries.
[1] Depression.”, “Causes Of the Great. “Causes of the Great Depression.” The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th Ed. 2019. Accessed January 08, 2019. https://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/causes-great-depression-0.
[2] “History.” Neilsons Since 1839 in Oxford MS. Accessed January 08, 2019. https://neilsonsdepartmentstore.com/services/history/.
[3] Kelleway, James. About Oxford. Accessed January 08, 2019. http://www.oxfordms.net/reference/history.
[4] “It Was the Worst of times | Today in Mississippi | Featured Article.” Today in Mississippi. Accessed January 08, 2019. http://www.todayinmississippi.com/featured_article/article/5922.