Florence Owens Thompson - Definition and Overview

Florence Owens Thompson (b. 1901 or 1903 - d. September 1983) Woman in Dorothea Lange's famous photo "Migrant Mother" (1936).

A full blood Cherokee Indian, from Oklahoma, Florence, in 1917, married Cleo Owens, a farmer. In 1922 Florence and Cleo Owens moved to Shafter, California. In 1924 they moved to Porterville, some 50 miles north of Shafter, where Cleo and his brothers had found good work at good wages in the sawmill. But in 1927 the mill burned so they moved 125 miles further north to Merced Falls. There was no "Falls", but there was a sawmill, a strong river to carry logs down from the hills, and a small town. Merced Falls sat on the eastern side of the Great Central Valley of California, just barely in the foothills, and consisted only of five or six streets, one store and one school. In September of 1929, Florence gave birth to the fifth of her 10 children, a girl, Ruby. In the same year, Wall Street crashed.

Cleo lost his job in 1931 and the family moved to Oroville in Northern California, where Cleo joined his sisters and brothers working in the fields picking peaches. Cleo died soon after moving, at age 32, from a high fever and was buried there. At Cleo's death Florence was expecting a child. During the next two years, Florence stayed around Oroville while her husband's family followed the crops around the state returning to winter at Oroville. In 1933, Florence informed them that she was expecting. The whole family was in a uproar, but Florence never told who the father was. She then took her kids and returned to her mother in Oklahoma to have the child.

Florence moved back to Merced Falls in 1934 and joined Cleo's family again. As families started leaving the town Florence started to move with her children from one town to another, from one camp to the next.

Florence's "fame"

In 1936 while driving down U.S. 101 highway the car, overheated, coasted to a stop just inside a camp. Florence set up a camp there and Jim Hill, a man who had started living with Florence and her boys left to get help for their car. As Florence waited for Hill and her boys to come back Dorothea Lange drove up and asked if she could take some photos of Florence and her family. Lange’s notes read: "I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food." though her son Troy Owens recounts: "There’s no way we sold our tires, because we didn’t have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have.".

Florence died in September 1983. Her gravestone reads: "Migrant Mother–A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood."

External link

• Photographic License (http://www.newtimes-slo.com/archives/cov_stories_2002/cov_01172002.html) - cover story in the New Times on Migrant Mother
• Smithsonian magzine (http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues02/mar02/indelible.html) article on tracking down Thompson in the 1970s to tell her story.