Week 40’s theme for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is Preservation. During WWII, creating and maintaining Victory Gardens became an important daily chore in the lives of many American families. Due to food shortages and mandatory rationing, government propaganda campaigns encouraged anyone who was able to grow and preserve their own food to do so. Along with scrap metal drives, Victory Gardens became one of many Home Front initiatives during the war. The government told American citizens that by growing crops for their own personal consumption, they would help reduce the cost to feed the troops. It was their patriotic duty. Citizens eagerly pitched in to do their part, creating gardens anywhere from sprawling yards to container gardens on windowsills. Communities allocated plots of public parks and land for the purpose. People commandeered vacant lots. Eleanor Roosevelt even grew a Victory Garden at the White House in an effort to lead by example, hoping to encourage other American women to do the same. It is estimated that a third of the produce grown in the US during WWII was grown in home gardens.
Among my grandmother and great-grandmother’s pictures and letters was a newspaper article about Eugenie (Girard) Laberge’s Victory Garden in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Eugenie was my great-grandmother Blanche’s sister-in-law. She married Blanche’s elder brother, David. The couple had five children together, some of whom were still living at home when the article was written in the 1940s. Eugenie was accustomed to gardening. According to the article, she learned to preserve food when she was 12, and it sounds like it’s something she had always done to help feed her family even before the war made it necessary. Eugenie lamented that the year before she put up “only” 400 quarts because she had been sick.
In her garden she grew tomatoes and carrots (the government recommended these crops for their high nutritional value) as well as radishes, peppers, beets, pole beans, and butter beans. She also kept chickens for meat and eggs. In her spare time, she sewed patchwork quilts. As you can read for yourself in the article below, it sounds like Eugenie was an industrious and humble person. She took it as a matter of course that anyone with the land and ability to care for a garden would do what she was doing.
Eugenie and other ancestors from the WWII era were thankful they had the ability to put up extra food, and it’s likely that those who hadn’t gardened previously were especially proud of their contributions to their families and the war effort. With the recent pandemic, Victory Gardens saw a mini resurgence. Between supply chain issues causing food shortages and price hikes, and quarantines which left people isolated, bored, and anxious, gardening provided many people with a useful, new hobby. Instead of the government pamphlets and recipe books used by the Greatest Generation, people turned to the internet to learn how to can and preserve food. Our ancestors like Eugenie could have taught our generation so much.
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