Recent poster (right) promoting mobile homes
traces their design history. Brault collection.

The years of the Depression also saw the rising phenomenon of the migratory "sun birds." These were retired couples who would travel year-round in their trailers, following the temperate seasons. Social observers noted that the changing family size and structure and the end of living arrangements which included the extended family contributed to the movement." 13 Most of these people were retired, middle class citizens of the northern industrial states. They sold their homes, purchased trailers and travelled to the sunbelt states such as Florida and California, congregating in vast camps for the winter and returning to rural areas of the north for the summer. Their wandering way of life not only heralded the advent of huge trailer parks in the south catering primarily to a retired population, it also released them from more mundane municipal responsibilities such as real estate taxes.

As one contemporary observer put it:

Hundreds of thousands of people, especially retired older couples whose children have left home, after some trailer vacationing experience, will sell the old homestead, as many already have and "get free," free of taxes, free of fuel bills, free of cold and free of heat.' 14

But the migratory way of life was not only undertaken by senior citizens. Many of those people made unemployed by the Depression also took to the trailer life, to follow job leads, to avoid taxes and to save money on shelter. They often brought their young families with them and lived year-round in trailer camps. There was a dichotomy developing even then between the retired trailer vagabonds, who chose to spend the remainder of their days in carefree travel and fraternal camaraderie and the migrant workers and poor working class families who could afford nothing else. 15

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