Caprock Chronicles: FDR's Great Plains Shelterbelt Program in 1930s included Panhandle

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Caprock Chronicles essay this week is written by Paul Carlson of Lubbock. It reviews the early evolution of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Great Plains Shelterbelt Program of the 1930s.

Between 1935 and 1942 the Federal government undertook a major program to plant trees in windbreaks or shelterbelts on the Great Plains from North Dakota to Texas.

The shelterbelt program, known after 1935 as the Prairie States Forestry Project, had several purposes. During the Great Depression years of the 1930s, it would put people to work planting trees.

It would ameliorate problems related to the decade’s drought and dust storms by blocking ground wind and preventing wind from picking up dust. Wind erosion would be slowed.

The trees when grown would improve the attractiveness and esthetic value of farmsteads and provide homes and winter shelter for wild animals and protection from cold winds for livestock.

Unfortunately, when news of the shelterbelt project first came out in 1934, a government map showed a 100-mile wide belt running from Canada into Northwest Texas, including parts of the Panhandle.

The map left an impression that the long, wide belt would be planted into a solid block of trees — a forest on the Great Plains. Such was never the plan, but the mistaken idea led to ridicule and heavy criticism.

The plan, rather, as it evolved through 1933 and early 1934, centered on planting trees with participating farmers in shelterbelts here and there along selected edges of crop fields where they would ameliorate the erosive effects of high wind picking up dust (and dirt) and carrying it away.

Lincoln, Nebraska, became the headquarters for the project, and personnel began arriving there in August, 1934. The Forest Service ran the program.

The “zone” followed approximately the 97th meridian, and each of the six states involved, including Texas, had a local headquarters and staff. Wichita Falls was the Texas headquarters.

The first of eight planning seasons (1935-1942) began on March 19, 1935, when officials planted the first tree, an Austrian Pine, on the farm of H. E. Curtis near Mangum, Oklahoma.

The planting season in Texas normally ran for about three months — March through May. Farther north, say, in the Dakotas it ran from April through June.

Also in Texas, Foard, Wilbarger, Cottle, Baylor, Childress, Collingsworth, Wheeler and Motley counties became part of the program, and perhaps Knox, King, Hemphill, Donley, Briscoe, Wichita and Archer counties received trees.

Species of trees for use in the program varied from state to state. Among the most popular in Texas were American elm, caragana, Chinese elm, hackberry, honey locust, Russian olive, bois d’ arc, willow, red cedar, cottonwood and Austrian pine, but there were many others.

Initial plans were for ten-row (or more) windbreaks, but often, especially after the Federal government encouraged individual farmers to take over more of the responsibility for preparing the ground for planting, three- to six-row stands became common.

To secure the trees in Texas, the Forest Service, according to Tai Kriedler, used a nursery near Rayland, and to plant them it “employed relief laborers from the WPA program.”

Planting crews received wages of 35-cents per hour with the crew foreman receiving 50-cents per hour. Most crews included 10 to 16 men, with each man working as an individual planting unit.

Crew members provide their own tools, a practice which at first resulted in the use of a great variety of shovels and spades. Eventually, a standard, uniform planting shovel became common throughout the project.

The Prairie States Forestry Project plantings were generally of two kinds: farmstead windbreaks for the protection of farm or ranch headquarters, the livestock, and the farm family; and field shelterbelts for the protection of crops and cropland.

In the early years of the program, shelterbelts along section lines and highways were most common. Later, farmstead windbreaks — to protect buildings and feed lots — connected to field shelterbelts became popular.

David F. Van Haverbeke writes that from Canada to Texas between “1935 and 1942, 200 million trees and shrubs were planted as field windbreaks on some 30,000 farms.”

The project officially came to an end on July 1, 1942, when responsibility for its administration was transferred to the Soil Conservation Service.

The project’s success was mixed. Shelterbelts and windbreaks provided homes for wildlife, protected livestock in winter, added to the esthetic value of the farmstead and provided other benefits. Of course, they took land out of cultivation.

They may have prevented soil erosion to a limited extent. A Shelterbelt survey in 1944, writes Haverbeke, “declared the Shelterbelt Project a success.”

A more comprehensive survey ten years later indicated “that nearly 30 percent [of the shelterbelts] were seriously damaged by livestock and 45 percent contained dense sod and weed growth.”

By 1954 and afterward, many shelterbelts had been ignored, abandoned or neglected. Twenty years later, some shelterbelts had been removed. Others needed renovation as dead trees increased in number in the shelterbelts or overcrowding existed as the conifers grew and spread.

Today, field shelterbelts are disappearing even as farmstead windbreaks remain popular and useful.