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sunflowerlovergirl

when women were stronger than strong

July 6, 1936, Route 66, New Mexico. This is Martha Evans, 32. She had been walking for three days. Her husband died of tuberculosis in Oklahoma in May. The farm was foreclosed. She took the six kids and a Radio Flyer wagon and started west for California. The twins in the wagon were 11 months old. The boys walking were 6, 5, 4, and 3. Her dress was torn on barbed wire. Her leg was cut and infected. She wrapped it with a feed sack. She had $1.60 in her pocket. A photographer from the Resettlement Administration saw them and pulled over. He offered her a ride. She said no. She said if she took a ride now, the kids would expect one every time they were tired. She gave him her name and kept walking. The photo ran in newspapers across the country. Donations came to a PO box in Barstow. She got $200 and a bus ticket. She made it to Bakersfield and picked grapes. All six kids lived. Three went to college. Martha died in 1978. The wagon is in the Smithsonian

thommymars

🖤ANGEL OR DEVIL?1🖤

dinovelvet

moonlight26posts-blog

mockva

This is real footage from 120 years ago.

None of the people in it knew that the city around them had four days left…

What you are watching is a cable car gliding down Market Street in San Francisco, filmed on the 14th of April, 1906.

The camera was mounted on the front of the car, so you see the city exactly as it was: the crowds, the horse-drawn carriages, the early automobiles weaving through traffic, the men in hats, the great buildings rising on either side. An ordinary spring afternoon in a thriving American city.

Four days later, on the morning of the 18th of April, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck. The shaking lasted under a minute, but it ignited fires that burned through the city for days…

By the time it was over, more than 3,000 people were dead and roughly 80 percent of San Francisco had been destroyed. Almost every building you see in this footage was gone.

And the film itself nearly went with it.

The negative was placed on a train bound for New York on the 17th of April, the day before the earthquake. Had it left a single day later, it would have burned in the fire along with the studio that made it.

This entire moving record of a lost city survives because of one day…