Every Small Town Ran on the General Store Tab — So What Happened When Families Couldn’t Pay?

In 1894, a Mississippi preacher wrote down what happened to a farmer he called Mr. Henry. Henry owed his merchant about $3,000, all of it balances carried over from year to year. His farm was worth $5,000. The merchant took it for $3,500, and Henry left with a smaller place and $100 in cash. "If you didn't make no money, that's all right," an Arkansas sharecropper remembered of settling-up day. "They would advance you more." In this video, we open the records farm families and storekeepers left behind: W. E. B. Du Bois's count of 300 tenant families in Dougherty County, Georgia, in 1898, the Georgia corn that cost 78 cents in cash and $1.04 on time in 1878, a 1910 lien in Wilson County, North Carolina, that pledged two mules named Rhodie and Katie, the larceny warrants that hauled two debtors back from Florida in 1901, Alonzo Bailey's $15 advance and 136 days of hard labor, the Texas farmers' exchange that tried to cut out the merchant in 1887, a mountain storekeeper's unpaid books in 1938, and the federal loans at three percent that finally gave families another place to go. This is the story of how the general store tab carried America's farm families from planting to harvest, and what it took from them when the crop came up short. 💬 If your family ran a tab at a country store, tell us in the comments: what was the storekeeper's name, and did he ever let a bill sit? #AmericanHistory #GeneralStore #StoreCredit #CropLien #Sharecropping #RuralAmerica #OldSouth #GreatDepression #NewDeal #FarmHistory #CottonSouth #SmallTownAmerica #HistoryDocumentary #Documentary #OldAmerica