Florence Owens Thompson
Encyclopedia : F : FL : FLO : Florence Owens Thompson
Florence Owens Thompson (c. 1901–September 16, 1983), born Florence Leona Christie, is famous for being the subject of Dorothea Lange's famous photo "Migrant Mother" (1936).
Florence, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma[link], married farmer Cleo Owens in 1917. In 1922, Florence and Cleo Owens moved to Shafter, California. In 1924, they moved to Porterville, some 50 miles (80 km) north of Shafter, where Cleo and his brothers had found good work at good wages in a sawmill. But in 1927, the mill burned down so they moved 125 miles (200 km) further north to Merced Falls. There was no "Falls", but there was a sawmill, a strong river to carry logs down from the hills, and a small town. Merced Falls sat on the eastern side of the California Central Valley in the foothills and consisted of five or six streets, one store and one school. In September 1929, Florence gave birth to the fifth of her seven children, a girl named Ruby. In the same year, Wall Street crashed.
Cleo lost his job at the sawmill in 1931, and the family moved to Oroville in northern California, where Cleo joined his brothers and sisters working in the fields picking peaches. Cleo died soon after moving, at the age of 32, from a high fever and was buried in Oroville. At the time of Cleo's death Florence was expecting a child. During the next two years, Florence stayed around Oroville while her husband's family followed the crops around the state returning to winter at Oroville.
In 1933, Florence discovered that she was expecting another child. Afraid that the father’s influential family would take the child she returned to her mother's home, Florence bolted with her children back to the Akman farm in Oklahoma.
Florence moved back to Merced Falls in 1934 leaving the infant, Charlie, to be raised by his grandparents. As families started leaving the town, Florence moved with her children from one town to another, from one camp to the next. Florence remembered that "when Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath about those people living under the bridge at Bakersfield—at one time we lived under that bridge. It was the same story. Didn’t even have a tent then, just a ratty old quilt."[link]
Florence's \"fame\"
In 1936, while driving down US Highway 101, the car's timing belt snaped and they coasted to a stop just inside a camp. Florence set up a camp there and Jim Hill, a man who was living with Florence, went to get help for their car, with two of her seven sons. As Florence waited for Hill and her boys to come back, Dorothea Lange drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. Over 10 min she took 6 images. Lange wrote of the meeting:- "I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."
- "There’s no way we sold our tires, because we didn’t have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have."
External links
- [Photographic License] - cover story in the New Times on Migrant Mother
- [Smithsonian magazine] article on tracking down Thompson in the 1970s to tell her story.
- [Audio of Thompson, Florence Owens]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.