Faro and Doris Caudill - Pie Town Homesteaders

In April of 1940, when Russell Lee stopped in Pie Town, New Mexico - to take pictures of Depression-era people eking out a living under FDR's "New Deal" policies - he met Faro and Doris Caudill.  Of the 600+ photos which Lee took in and around Pie Town (for the U.S. Farm Security Administration), members of the Caudill family appear in more than a hundred.

About 250 families lived in Pie Town at the time of Lee's visit.  (Lee, and his wife Jean, stayed with the Caudills.)  Years later, after Doris Caudill (who was twenty-five in Lee's pictures and lived 11 miles south of town, at the foot of Alegra Mountain) had left the area, she wrote a forty-six page memoir about her life in the town:

We were dirt poor but we didn't know it.  We were happy and made our own fun.  (Pie Town Woman: The Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader, by Joan Myers, page 46.)

Faro and Doris had a battery-operated radio - one of few couples in town with such a possession.  When they received Sears catalogs in the mail, they had no money to buy anything so they used the pages as toilet paper.  We know this because Doris told her story to Joan Myers:

Doris's stories spill out beyond the images.  She creates mental images for me of a room full of people listening to a Montgomery Ward's battery-powered radio, bricks that Doris' mother heated in the oven then put on the floor of their Model T to keep everyone's feet warm [Doris grew up in Sweetwater, Texas], two plates and three quilts from her hope chest, a five-cent Sweetwater hamburger, Sears mail-order catalogs that Doris and her husband Faro used for toilet paper.  (If you do not have an income, you cannot use the catalogs to order things.) ... (Pie Town Woman, page 52.)

Click on the image for a better view.  Part of the "Bound for Glory" exhibition from the Library of Congress.

Credits

Image 20 (of 70) included in the Exhibition, "Bound for Glory," online courtesy Library of Congress.  The LOC describes this reproduction, from a color slide, as follows:

Faro and Doris Caudill, homesteaders. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-317. LC-DIG-fsac-1a34096. FSA/OWI Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Quoted passages from Pie Town Woman: The Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader, by Joan Myers.