FORT WORTH, Texas — After enduring nearly a year of drought, Texans have grown accustomed to seeing acres of withered crops, scores of dried-up ponds and mile after mile of cracked earth.
But the drought that began last fall has yet to eclipse the infamous dry spell of the 1950s, a bleak period when the skies stubbornly withheld moisture. It was the state’s worst drought ever.
Nearly everyone who lived through that time remembers constant hardship: Water supplies ran so low some communities had to import it from Oklahoma. Farms and ranches failed. And the lack of rain actually changed the state’s demographics because so many families fled rural agricultural areas for cities.
“I have never seen it this brown across the state of Texas, including in the 1950s,” said rancher Tom Woodward, 67. “In the 1950s it was a series of years, but we got some rain. This year, it’s just phenomenal because it has not rained for the most part.”
From 1949 to 1957, Texas got 30 to 50 percent less rain than normal, and temperatures rose above average.
In search of grazing land, many ranchers took their cattle to Kansas, where Jim Link was a preteen ranch hand. He remembers trying to find a missing steer one day in a pasture and walking into a strangely empty house.
“It was kind of spooky,” said Link, now a 68-year-old part-time cattle rancher south of Fort Worth. “The table was still set. The furniture was still there. The clothes were in the closet. The bank had foreclosed on the house.”
Link once asked his grandfather how the drought compared to the Depression. “He said the biggest difference was that in the ’30s, it broke people financially. But the 1950s broke them spiritually.”
The 1950s brought the second-, third- and eighth-driest years ever in the state — 1956, 1954 and 1951, according to the National Weather Service.
This year’s drought, with little rainfall since last fall and weeks of triple-digit temperatures, has been declared the second-most severe in state history and the worst for a single year. Nearly 95 percent of the state is in the worst or second-worst categories of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
