The Waltons weren't poor

Grapes of Wrath is grim, is meant to be about forced (internal) migration/ displacement, not simply about the Great Depression. Of Mice and Men also describes 1930s rural poverty and itinerant workers, not just about a guy with LDs.

The social portrait in To Kill a Mockingbird is better (than GoW) imho for showing 1930s southern poverty. The teacher not understanding the child who came to school with no shoes or lunch, for instance. Scout was feral but she was also grateful to live in a prosperous household & to have choices in life. Which fits with the sequel books where she follows those opportunities to escape the stiltifying atmosphere.

It's definitely not me with a craving for misery.

Yes me too

Yes! I'd forgotten her real name was Michael 🤣🤣

I read the book this was based on, or possibly the book was a spin-off from the series. Anyway, it was just after my mill and mine holiday last year (Derbyshire, Quarry Bank - site of the Mill,) and mining museums. I like a good bit of industrial history.

Yes its on great tv. Free streaming channel

Is the Waltons on any of the streaming services? I would love to watch it again.

I always wondered what Hominy Grits were, before the internet

“Papa’s recipe” I wish I had the formula too.

Watch THE MILL on, I think, Amazon Prime. Your craving for misery will be satisfied by by its depiction of a textile mill in the north.

So, exactly like OP.

I remember one episode where cousin Rose and her dc visit and John got annoyed as her son was being faddy

also the Poltergeist episode was really scary, I did like the show

A large family means more people to work on the farm.

The farm has to be big enough to support them all.

It’s a fictionalised version of a real family but made appealing to the audience of the time. I’ve seen a programme on the real family it was based on and things were tighter than depicted in the show. The number of children was typical in that area in that era, remember religion had a lot of influence and pastors/preachers definitely favoured larger families and women had little say in this (look at bios and listen to lyrics by country singers as to how male dominated those areas were and how many kids lived in shacks without running water).

what is considered deprived changes over time eg on Mumsnet people wrote as if kids sharing a bedroom is wrong where 100 years ago whole families shared one room in a tenement block with kids sharing beds.

Complaining about poverty is mostly about expectations- there is always someone poorer than you. They are resource and business owners, so not really poor, but as such they could reasonably expect not to send children to school shoeless- so from their perspective they were poor.

Oh my god! That must have been so unsettling. Why were they grabbing their guns so quickly?

This is what scares me about America - the easy access to guns and the willingness to use them. 😲The Waltons seems very, very sanitised in comparison.

The Waltons is a sanitised rosy glasses world of rural life in the 30’s in the US.
It is a TV show with underlying moral themes of the goodness of being a Christian and coming from a close family.

It is not a reality of the depression in the US . As someone else has said The Grapes of Wrath is that.

And the show glosses over the incest that definitely happened.

I don’t think it’s a particularly large house for the US but they did appear well fed and comfortable unless the storyline required them not to be for that week’s episode.

I have visited Walton’s Mountain and surrounding area and it’s one of the most hostile to outsiders places I have ever visited. Wherever we went, we got stared at and our out-of-state plates on the car made us a target on the roads. When we were driving around admiring the scenery, householders would come onto their porches with guns when they spotted a strange car. We had dinner in a chain restaurant and were stared at for a full hour by locals in there. There is a Walton’s museum there which for no known reason has a “war room” which includes Nazi memorabilia including a massive Swasitika flag proudly on display. We didn’t stick around for the planned length of our stay. Very unlikely they would have been friendly to outsiders back then either.

A large family means more people to work on the farm.

Exactly. It’s called being “House Poor”. You have a home and land but very little in disposable income. This is a common situation in the Southern United States.

As stated earlier, they had a sawmill. It didn’t matter what most people had or didn’t, they weren’t most people. The series is loosely based on writer Earl Hamner’s family. The focus of the show was the strength and love of family and the belief in community. If there’s no conflict, no obstacle, no struggle, there’s no story. The car, the radio, etc. are props to support the narrative. It was never intended to be about the bleak, gritty, hopeless aspects of the Great Depression. It was meant to be cozy, inspiring, and uplifting. It was meant to ENTERTAIN. That’s all.

I always wanted to try that recipe the Baldwin sisters made.

They could afford a radio which was a luxury item at the time.