Photo mystery connected Georgia gal to Clyde orchard

By Han­nah Mingus

Enter­prise Intern

After a Geor­gia woman’s mother and father passed away in 2005, she inher­ited their old pho­tographs and dis­cov­ered later her fam­ily had a link to Clyde, Ohio.

Some of the pho­tographs depicted Patti Wilkins’ mother work­ing in a field along­side sev­eral other women. It remained a mys­tery to her.

The Sautee-Nacoochee, Geogia, res­i­dent dug a lit­tle deeper and later dis­cov­ered that her mother, Betty Owens, had been a part of the Women’s Land Army dur­ing the sum­mer of 1944.

That sum­mer there was a major short­age in labor in the farm indus­try. The local Ohio fruit grow­ers requested backup from the Women’s Land Army so the crops would not go to waste, accord­ing to the Let­ters from Land Army Camp Inter­net blog site.

Accord­ing to Wilkins, the Women’s Land Army was a move­ment which oper­ated dur­ing World War I and World War II, in Great Britain, Aus­tralia and in Amer­ica. In north­ern Ohio, Women’s Land Army camps were estab­lished in Ashtab­ula, Erie, Lorain and San­dusky coun­ties, the sum­mer of 1944. Each camp aver­aged about 30 to 35 Land Girls, she said.

Betty Owens worked at Tay­lor Orchards in Clyde.

After her sum­mer work­ing at the camp, Owens cor­re­sponded through let­ters with her friend Jean Wolf, whom she had met that summer.

Sixty-seven years later, Jean’s sis­ter, Jo Ann Wolf, stum­bled upon those letters.

Jo Ann read in one let­ter that Owens had requested sev­eral photo neg­a­tives from Jean, but never received them.

Wilkins said Jo Ann Wolf researched Betty Owens at the West Vir­ginia His­tory and Archives web site, which is how she tracked down the Wilkins’ daugh­ters. Jo Ann gave the Wilkins sis­ters nearly 20 let­ters their mother had writ­ten to Jean from 1944 to 1945.

“My sis­ter and I now have an insight into our mother as a young woman, that we did not pre­vi­ously have,” Wilkins said.

Jo Ann Wolf and Wilkins had orig­i­nally dis­cussed self-publishing the let­ters, but they decided they would get more inter­ested read­ers by start­ing an edu­ca­tional blog site. The site received over 65 thou­sand hits in June alone, Wilkins said.

“We also like the abil­ity to add to this story as more infor­ma­tion sur­faces,” she added.

Nearly every day while work­ing at the camp, Jean wrote home to her fam­ily. These let­ters are now being posted on the blog site, lettersfromlandarmycamp.org, on the anniver­sary of their orig­i­nal writing.

Jean aspired to go to col­lege, and she decided that work­ing in the Land Army was the best way to fund it. She worked in Tay­lor Orchards from June 7, 1944 to mid-August of that year.

“I would imag­ine she was also very inter­ested in travel and adven­ture, while sup­port­ing the war effort on the home­front,” Wilkins commented.

Fall of 1944, Jean attended Mor­ris Har­vey Col­lege in Charleston, WV. Wilkins said they are cur­rently in the works of doing a fol­low up story about Jean’s life after Land Army Camp for the blog.

Posted by Staff Reports on Aug 5 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.