Penderlea: Roosevelt's Model Farm Community

In nineteen thirty-four, at the depth of the Depression, the federal government turned to a ten-thousand-acre tract in Pender County for an ambitious experiment. Penderlea Homesteads was established as a model farm community under President Roosevelt's New Deal, designed to lift penniless tenant farmers and bankrupt landowners back toward self-sufficiency. Relief workers cleared land, built wells, pump houses, barns, chicken coops, and small homes on twenty-acre plots.

The project drew its original inspiration from resettlement communities founded by a Wilmington businessman named Hugh MacRae in the early nineteen hundreds, but the federal government took it over and scaled it up. At its peak, Penderlea was the largest rural homestead project of its kind in the country. In June of nineteen thirty-five, Eleanor Roosevelt herself came to visit the homesteaders.

The community never reached its goal of five hundred farms, but the houses and fields built here still stand as evidence of what government and ordinary people tried to build together in the worst of times.