Why Did 250,000 Teenagers Leave Home During the Great Depression?

Why did a quarter of a million teenagers leave home during the Great Depression? The true story of riding the rails, told by the kids who did it. In the winter of 1933, a 16-year-old in Kenosha, Wisconsin, saw his father cry for the first time. His father had just lost his job. So Jim Mitchell left a note on his pillow and rode out of town on a freight train, one less mouth to feed at home. By most estimates, about 250,000 young Americans, most of them teenagers, were riding the freights at the worst of the Depression. This is what they found on the road: missions that fed you after the sermon, back doors and hobo jungles, the deadly seconds of catching a moving train, railroad "bulls" with clubs and guns, a Black teenager put off a train in a Louisiana swamp to escape a mob, a 15-year-old farm girl from Wyoming who rode the freights, and the New Deal program that finally gave the boys a way home: the Civilian Conservation Corps. With the real voices of Jim Mitchell and Peggy Eaton DeHart, rare 1930s newsreel and documentary film, Farm Security Administration photographs, and the records of the 1933 U.S. Senate hearings on transient boys. Did someone in your family ride the rails, or feed a stranger at the back door? Tell us who they were, and where the road took them. CHAPTERS 0:00 One Morning in Kenosha 0:57 One Less Mouth 4:09 The Back Door 8:49 Catching Out 11:57 The Bulls 15:14 Back for Supper 17:51 The Way Off the Rails 21:02 What Became of Them Prices in today's money use the BLS Consumer Price Index (CPI-U, August 2026). "250,000" is the standard estimate; nobody counted the riders in the 1930s. SOURCES Riding the Rails, American Experience (PBS / WGBH, 1997), by Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression (Routledge, 2003) Fresh Air with Terry Gross (NPR / WHYY, 1997): Jim Mitchell and Peggy DeHart Relief for Unemployed Transients: Hearings, U.S. Senate Committee on Manufactures, S. 5121 (January 1933) Twentieth Annual Report of the Chief of the Children's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor (1932), "Transient boys" John N. Webb, The Transient Unemployed (WPA Research Monograph III, 1935-36) and The Migratory-Casual Worker (1937) Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789-1945 (U.S. Census Bureau, 1949), railway accidents, series K John E. Fawcett, "A Hobo Memoir, 1936," ed. Elizabeth Rambeau, Indiana Magazine of History 90:4 (1994) Joseph M. Speakman, "Into the Woods: The First Year of the Civilian Conservation Corps," Prologue 38:3 (National Archives, 2006) Encyclopedia of Alabama, "Scottsboro Trials" Pew Research Center (2020), young adults living with parents; Chapin Hall, Voices of Youth Count (2017) PICTURES AND FILM Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection (Dorothea Lange, John Vachon, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Carl Mydans, Theodor Jung, John Collier). U.S. National Archives: Rondal Partridge for the National Youth Administration, "On the Freights" and "Hitch-Hiking" (1940). Films: Valley Town (1940); Jobs Not Handouts (NYA, 1940); The Civilian Conservation Corps (U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1935); President Visits Foresters (Universal Newsreel, 1933); A Great Railroad at Work (1942); Dawn Strikes the Capitol Dome (WPA, c. 1936); Danger Lights (RKO, 1930); Beggars of Life (Paramount, 1928), via Internet Archive / Prelinger Archives / National Archives. Paramount News (1934). Wild Boys of the Road (Warner Bros., 1933), trailer title card. "CCC Camp Crystal Lake near Minocqua WI ca1939" by George Anton Groeschl, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Some footage: Storyblocks. MUSIC "Lost Time", "Evening", "Simple Duet", "Disquiet", "Sad Trio", "Windswept", "Clear Air", "Americana", "Eternal Hope" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "The Waltz of Long Ago", Fry's Million Dollar Pier Orchestra (1923), public domain recording (Internet Archive, Great 78 Project). Other music and sound effects: Storyblocks. SOUND "2010 UP844 Whistle" by Rvassar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. "WWS Projector running with the light on" by Work With Sounds, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Danger Lights (1930) and Universal Newsreel (1933): public domain sound. #GreatDepression #AmericanHistory #nostalgia