Kiowa County, Okla. 1902–24

Just after the turn of the 20th century, a group of farmers converged at the site of Kiowa County’s new grain elevator six miles south of Hobart, Oklahoma. Edith "Babbs" Babcock was given the honor of flipping the switch to deliver the first load of wheat to the switch. From then, the area in southwest Oklahoma was referred to as "Babbs Switch." It grew into a community of farms, complete with a general store, a gas station, and a school. Life was hard there, and it made the residents a close-knit community.
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Kiowa County was a challenging place to make a living in the early 20th century. The nomadic tribes that controlled the land for centuries—the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache—could have told the settlers that. Situated near the base of the Wichita Mountain range and surrounded by shortgrass plains, it was a land of extremes. Lacking a consistent natural water source, drought was always a threat. Each spring, violent thunderstorms and tornadoes appeared out of nowhere, causing floods due to a lack of natural reservoirs. The unpredictable spring was followed by the brutal predictability of summer. It would be hot, and the infamous Oklahoma wind swirling on the empty plains felt like living in a convection oven. Summer would overstay its welcome well into autumn—there were far too few trees to call it 'fall'—before giving way to the cooler temperatures and early sunsets of winter.

But Kiowa County winters were no Norman Rockwell paintings, either. Most of the time, it was cold, wet, and windy. It sleeted more often than it snowed, and it iced more often than it sleeted. Ice storms often paralyzed the community, threatened livestock, and cut off communication. Telephone and telegraph lines would snap and fall under the weight of inches of ice, while roads would become too hazardous for safe travel. When it did snow, it was often wet, light, and short-lived—an annoyance, really. The winter sun would often melt snow within a day, leaving behind cold, wet slush throughout the countryside.

And still the wind blew. The same wind that made summer a hell on earth made otherwise beautiful winter days bone-chillingly cold as strong north winds blew picked up moisture from sleet and slapped people's face with it at 20–40 miles per hour. But, every so often, Kiowa County would receive a real snow—a powder snow—that enveloped everything in a beautiful, shimmering soft white. On those days, the children of Kiowa County forgot about the wind, the farmers forgave God for the heat, and work ground to a halt as friends, families, and neighbors took in the spectacle. After suffering through a long summer, real snow was a treat, however inconvenient.

That was when times were good. Almost as soon as Babbs was founded, though, times were not good. Beginning in 1909, a severe drought ravaged Oklahoma, baking crops in the sun and drying creek beds throughout southwest Oklahoma. Farmers' yields were devastated. The drought continued into 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918. Crops failed. Banks called in loans. Life was hard. ​

Hobart third-grade class, 1907

But Kiowa County was made up of farmers, and farmers are resilient—especially ones in drought- and storm-prone areas. However tough it was to farm their land, it was their land, awarded in a land lottery. Weather was not going to drive them away, and there was nowhere else giving out free land. No, weather they could and would handle. It was the rest of the world that made life most difficult in the early 20th century.

When President Woodrow Wilson decided the United States should enter the Great War raging in Europe, Kiowa County heeded the call . . . and paid the price. 1918 alone saw 185 tearful goodbyes there. But there would not be 185 joyous reunions, as couriers delivered 29 solemn telegrams informing families another son was dead, whether it be in combat or of pneumonia.

The pneumonia that killed healthy, young soldiers in 1918 almost always followed a bout of influenza—the so-called Spanish Flu. At first, neither the soldiers nor their families realized they were in the grasp of a once-in-a-century global pandemic. As soldiers were given leave before shipping out to places they could not pronounce, they visited home one last time. Over dinner, they told the stories of their training, of how poorly the city boys shot, and of their sadistic but clever instructors—themselves battle-hardened veterans of wars in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and on the Mexico border. There were smiles and laughter, but beneath the veneer was a sadness that infected them all. Soldiers have always put on a brave face, and farmers from rugged southwest Oklahoma were no different. Eventually, their leave was up, and it was time to go. Soldiers smiled, hugged and kissed their tearful wives and mothers, and promised they would see them again. But they didn't know that, and they felt guilty for causing so much heartache—and that was before they realized they had hand-delivered the worst flu in a century to their beloved hometowns.

While the War to End All Wars continued in Europe, Kiowa County did its best to carry on, but times were hard. There was wartime rationing, and they were short handed, down 185 young, healthy workers in an area that is tough to farm with a full complement of farm hands. Then they started losing people at home. Kiowans relied on their local newspapers to report pneumonia cases. Small articles without a byline would notify the community that a resident was "dealing with pneumonia" or had recovered from pneumonia; too often, however, they read the newspaper to learn who was the latest victim of pneumonia.

When the soldiers returned to Kiowa County in 1919, it was not the same place. Over 100 Kiowans died in the 1918 pandemic, many of them children. Almost entire families perished, bloodlines extinguished. Parents lost their children. Children lost their parents. Farms lost their workers, and everyone lost friends and neighbors. It was over. The war was won, but it seemed a pyrrhic victory for communities like Kiowa County.

As America roared into the '20s, however, Kiowa County had bounced back. There was no more war; no more pandemic. And the years-long drought that scorched the earth had ended. Kiowa County’s population was up. The farms were fruitful, and the newspapers less dreadful. In the space used in 1918 to announce yet another neighbor had died of pneumonia, the Hobart Democrat-Chief reported that "Mrs. Smith was up from Babbs Switch this week, visiting her sister. She will return for Easter." The papers still reported on the medical issues plaguing Kiowa County, but the ailments and prognoses were comparatively minor after the hell of 1918. Like, in 1922, when the newspaper informed its readership that "little Ms. Mary Edens, one, burned her hand on a stove this Tuesday; Mrs. Edens says the little one is doing better now."
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After almost a decade of drought, war, and plague, life was back to normal for the folks of southwest Oklahoma.