On This Day

The 1930s were times of tremendous hardship on the Great Plains. Settlers dealt not only with the Great Depression, but also with years of drought that plunged them into relentless dust storms for days and months on end. Sunday, the 14th of April 1935, it got worse. The day is known in history as “Black Sunday,” when a mountain of blackness swept across the High Plains and instantly turned a warm, sunny afternoon into a horrible blackness.

Estimates placed the amount of displaced topsoil at 300,000 tons, some of which flew as far away as the East Coast.