UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

UCARE | Summer 2021 | Professor Sarah Karle | Advisor Laura Weakly Team: Sarah Cope

The Prairie State Forestry Project (PSFP) was a government led New Deal initiative to plant trees to serve as windbreaks across the Great Plains. In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started a series of New Deal Programs to address the Dust Bowl on farmland across the country. The farming crisis impacted land in twenty-seven states. A proposed, 1,200 mile-long 100-mile wide shelterbelt zone would stretch from Alberta, Canada to Texas. Over seven years, 200 million trees were planted in the shelterbelt zone across six states, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. This “great wall of trees” remains one of the largest efforts by the United States government to respond to an environmental problem. A central research question for the study is how many South Dakota Prairie State Forestry Shelters remain intact and how many have been destroyed? Over summer 2021, teamed up with Research in the Digital Humanities to digitally preserve and catalogue primary source PSFP documents for eventual public access. This was done through scanning images using a Zeutschel large format scanner and processing documents for archival quality.Analyzed documents for important data such as the Section, Township, and Range numbers/ letters that are used when trying to locate a specific shelterbelt locations. Translated information into a working spreadsheet used to collect metadata as a basis for a searchable database.