What companies went under due to the stock market crash 1929?

Millions of people from all over the world who owned stocks waited helplessly as stock values crashed. Bob Aden's father in Nebraska was one of thousands of owners of General Motors stock. He had borrowed money against the family car to buy a few shares.

The stock went up for a while and then dropped well below what he paid for it. LeRoy Hankel (right) still remembers the crash vividly. He was 19 years old and living in York County, Nebraska, in 1929.

He didn't own any stock, but remembers, "there was people jumping out of two-story, three-story buildings in New York. For Carla Due (right below), the stock market crash had a very personal impact. She had just emigrated to Nebraska from Denmark a few months before the crash.

Her family had bought a farm but were waiting to move on it. After the crash and the ensuing Depression, land values dropped to less than half of what they had been. Their farm was no longer worth what they still owed on the land.

The stock market downturn continued for at least three years. By the time it was over, the average value of companies in the Dow Jones Industrials Average had dropped almost 90 percent? From a high of 381 to a low of 41.

In other words, companies were worth barely more than 10 percent of their former value. Jobs were hard to find. Farmers and rural residents felt the stock market crash as well?

People and companies that used to buy food and other agricultural products no longer had the money to buy much of anything. Since the 1930s, there have been several stock market crashes and periods of economic slowdown. But there has never been another "Great" Depression.

See how other stock market crashes compared with the 1929 crash in this "Then & Now" feature. Written by Bill Ganzel of the Ganzel Group. First written and published in 2003.