Hemp on the homefront.

AMERICAN HISTORY ILLUSTRATED JUNE, 1979

by Steven Earl Coulter of Des Moines, Iowa. His father, Fred Earl
Coulter (1886-1964), had been licensed to grow almost 300 acres of
marijuana.

The war in the Pacific had cut off our vital supplies of hemp (marijuana)
from the Philippines. (sic) So the government asked farmers to grow hemp,
which was needed in the war effort for rope, landing nets, helmet covers,
and linen thread. My father grew it two years on his farm northwest of
Conrad, in Felix Township, Grundy County, Iowa. In 1944 he was the largest
hemp grower in the United States, according to the local county newspaper.

Labor was difficult to find, with most able-bodied farm workers
away in the armed forces. The tall hemp was cut down with machines, then
allowed to dry in standing shocks before being transported to a
two-block-long processing plant at Grundy Center, Iowa. In December 1943,
48 Italian prisoners of war from Camp Clark, Missouri, were brought to
Grundy County to help with the hemp harvest. They were housed at a former
CCC barracks at Eldora, Iowa.

My mother supplied the workers with great pots of coffee, and the
guard ate at our dinner table. One noon, while the guard was inside
eating, one German (sic) prisoner attempted to escape by driving up the
road on our small Ford tractor. My father and the guard jumped in the
pick-up truck and went after him. They caught him before he had gone far,
and took him back to the prison camp when he continued to be difficult.

The Germans drew swastikas in the dust on the ground, on cars,
wagons, buildings, everywhere. Reporters and sightseers often lined the
road with their vehicles, while they watched the prisoners shocking the
hemp. When news of German reverses in France came over a reporter's
blaring car radio, the onlookers cheered, but the German prisoners, in
their anger, started rocking the car in an attempt to overturn it.

Growing hemp proved to be a profitable endeavor for my father. He
received a $10,055 check for his 1943 crop, which was after seed and
harvesting expenses had been deducted, yielding a net profit of about $154
(sic)? per acre. The following year, he received a check for $26,616
gross. He had paid $4,000 for 14,800 pounds of hemp seed, and $2,560 for
harvesting and other labor. 1944 was not as good a yield as 1943; in fact,
10 of the 270 acres had been abandoned as too wet to work. Still, the net
was about $20,000 --- "more money than has ever been made before on an
equal number of acres of land in Grundy County in one year" (Grundy
Register, February 8, 1945).
For years afterward, we were visited by federal narcotics agenst
checking to see if the wild marijuana that sprang up each spring was being
properly destroyed. Even today, you will occasionally come across a
thriving plant or two in a central Iowa field or ditch. They are simply
reminders of a strange Iowa landscape 35 years ago when German and Italian
war prisoners shocked hemp under the watchful eyes of armed guards.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Jack Frazier for providing this information. His address:

Solar Age Hemp Paper Report, Solar Age Press, Box 610, Peterstown,
West Virginia 24963

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