The Great Depression hit rural Canada very hard and Black Canadian farmers especially hard. One consequence was that many of the Black Canadian villages and hamlets in Ontario and Nova Scotia, some which were founded in the 18th century as Loyalist settlements, became abandoned as their inhabitants moved to the cities in search of work. In turn, the movement of Black Canadians to the cities brought them brutally face to face with racism as a series of informal "Jim Crow" restrictions governed restaurants, bars, hotels, and theatres while many landlords refused to rent to black tenants. In October 1937, when a Black man purchased a house in Trenton, Nova Scotia, hundreds of white people stormed the house, beat up its owner and destroyed the house under the grounds that a Black man moving into the neighbourhood would depress property values. Inspired by the unwillingness of the police to protect a Black man, the mob then destroyed two other homes owned by Black men, an action praised by the mayor for raising property values in Trenton, and the only person charged by the police was a Black man who punched out a white trying to destroy his home. Many Black Nova Scotians moved into a neighbourhood of Halifax that came to be known as Africville, which the white population of Halifax called "Nigger Town". Segregation in Truro, Nova Scotia, was practised so fiercely that its Black residents took to calling it "Little Mississippi". The 1930s saw a dramatic increase in the number and activities of Black self-help groups to deal with the impact of racism and the Depression. Another change wrought by the Depression was a change in Black families as most married Black women had to work in order to provide for their families, marking the end of an era when only the husband worked.