Hugh Bennett
North Carolina State University
Hugh Bennett grew up on his father’s North Carolina farm. They used terracing in their fields, “to keep land from washing away!”, as his father always said. Bennett became a soil scientist at the Bureau of Soils at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When the Dust Bowl began, Bennett asked for men from the Civilian Conservation Corps to help conserve soil. After Black Sunday and the creation of the Soil Conservation Service, Hugh Bennett described the storm as a turning point in the battle to get a program dedicated to conserving soil. He headed the Soil Conservation Service with the help of Henry Finnell until 1952.