There's a declaration of emergency over the number of unhoused people in Bloomington right now, and efforts to provide new housing and expanded space in shelters. The issue is not new, though the response today is perhaps more humane than it was in other eras.
“That's what they called them then, hobos. Sometimes they call them bums, but they [bums] were the ones that didn't want to work,” said the late Walt Bittner, a former Bloomington mayor and longtime city council member who grew up during the Great Depression.
“These hobo jungles, they used to call them, sometimes there were 50-60, people living in these old used cars. Junkyards had old cars laying around,” said Bittner. “Just two blocks from our house on the other side of the railroad tracks, there was a hobo jungle.”
This community has struggled with this problem throughout the 20th century, and even in the 19th century, said Bill Kemp, librarian at the McLean County Museum of History.
“The hobos were really the people that were down on their luck and were traveling from town to town trying to find a job,” said Bittner in a 2002 oral history for the museum.
“By the fall of 1931 we had a hobo camp south of what was then the Meadows manufacturing plant. This would be near the intersection of Bunn and Croxton, just a little south and east of the central business district of Bloomington,” said Kemp.
“Us kids used to go down there and talk to them, and they'd be cooking something over a little open fire. They'd be cooking some kind of a stew in an old tin can or an old frying pan or something,” said Bittner.
“The local press is filled with stories about hobo camps popping up here and there throughout Bloomington-Normal in the late 1920s and through the 1930s,” said Kemp.
“You didn't have to be afraid of people then. Nobody bothered you. In fact, they enjoyed talking to us. Neighborhood kids would just go down there, sometimes six or seven at a time,” said Bittner.
“During the 1930s city leaders, led by the city council, would urge the police from time to time to break up these camps or stop the organization of nascent camps,” said Kemp.
“They were just people down the road looking for a job to feed their family. Their family was maybe miles away, but they come to Bloomington to see if they could find a job,” said Bittner.
“The police then would get their orders to move in and, quite violently, often, break up these camps and force the folks to move out,” said Kemp.
“We've always in this area been pretty lucky not to be as hard hit by a depression as a lot of parts of the country were, so Bloomington-Normal was kind of a place to stop, and if you couldn't find a job, at least you could get something to eat,” said Bittner.
“In June 1933 Alderman P.J. Ervin asked the police to disperse a camp on West Grove Street that used to be the location of the Paul F. Beich candy factory,” said Kemp. And indeed, about a week later or so, Bloomington Chief of Police Paul Gearman, with the force of a vagrancy law behind him, quote, ‘routes the undesirables,’ “said Kemp.
“They'd come and beg food. My mother never turned them down. She always told them, stay on the porch and she'd make them some sandwiches,” said Bittner.
“You know, they didn't have money to replace things like you do today. You just had to do with what you had. During the Great Depression, as they called her, jobs were so scarce you took what you could get. There were a lot of people on relief, they called it then,” said Bittner.
“The unhoused problem became such that the federal government had organized transient encampments where the unhoused were employed for several hours a day in order to earn their room and board, and were actually given, I think, 50 cents or so a week,” said Kemp.
“Groceries were real cheap. Milk was a nickel a quart, if you took your own container. It wasn't even pasteurized. It was just milk right out of the cow. They had what they call bulk milk,” said Bittner.
“It was in mid-1934 that 200 men were turned out of an overwhelmed federal transient encampment in Springfield. Many of them made their way to Bloomington. The two most important shelters in Bloomington, Salvation Army and Home Sweet Home Mission, what is today, Home Sweet Home Ministries, were both promptly overwhelmed,” said Kemp.
“They had ways of marking the sidewalk. If they got a handout at a certain house, they had a code of some kind. They put chalk marks on the sidewalk that this was a good place to go get some to eat,” said Bittner.
“We see references to this proliferation of hobo camps in Bloomington-Normal during the Great Depression, even as the depression is kind of winding down in 1939-1940,” said Kemp.
“You know, we always hear people talking about the good old days. Have you ever heard that phrase? Well, I think today is the good old days right now. People got more than they ever had,” said Bittner.
McHistory is a co production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.
