Howdy Forest County Residents!
Today I am going to speak about a disaster the occurred in the 1920’s that I did not know about until last year when I interviewed one of Crandon’s oldest residents. She regaled me with her recollection of the grasshopper plague that hit Forest County in 1922 and 1923 in which swarms of grass hoppers destroyed the landscape. The interviewee recalled that during this time she was walking with a friend and her child and the child lost her shoe. When they went to look for it in the morning there was nothing left but a bit of sole because the grasshoppers had eaten it overnight!
This week I found the memories of Keith Jesse from Argonne written down describing the same catastrophe. Jesse wrote “The grasshoppers ate everything in sight. A lot of the farmers had to sell their cattle because they didn’t have money to buy hay with. Pa had sent to North Dakota and got three car loads of hay shipped in and we had to feed the cattle the rest of the summer. The county agent went to different farmers, and they had a meeting in Argonne. The agent came there and showed the farmers how to mix grasshopper poison which consisted of wheat bran, oranges, banana oil, and arsenic”.
