Detroit Thrift Gardens of 1931 – The Depression Years

Linking the 1931 Thrift Gardens with the 1894 Potato Patch Plan through Mrs. Hazel Pingree Depew, the former Mayor’s daughter

Mayor Frank Murphy – the Detroit Years
By Sidney Fine
1984 Vol 3

Excerpt:

The outstanding popular success of the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee (MUC) and, in the opinion of the mayor, “perhaps” its “most important undertaking,” was the Detroit thrift-garden program. The suggestion that the MUC undertake this activity came from Murphy himself, who had been reading George Catlin’s The Story of Detroit and had been impressed with the account of Hazen Pingree’s famous “potato patch plan” and the manner in which a substantial number of welfare families in Detroit during the depression years 1894-1896 had grown a portion of their food on vacant lots donated to the city for that purpose. The MUC decided in March, 1931, to undertake a similar program of “vacant lot gardening.”

Murphy and the MUC saw the Detroit thrift gardens as serving twin objectives: the gardens of course, would provide food for some of the needy; but the plan’s sponsors, fearful, as Murphy expressed it, that “the psychological effect of idleness of large groups of our people” was “dangerous to the safety and morale of the country,” also hoped that the project would help to preserve the “work habits” of the unemployed. The supervisor of one garden plot stated bluntly that the principal virtue of the gardens was that they served to “keep funny ideas out of the minds of our unemployed” and helped them to maintain their “self-respect.” When the depression was over, he said, the gardeners would consequently be “the same industrious law-abiding citizens they were before.”

See the complete passage in Sidney Fine’s book here in Google Books.