Norvelt: Eleanor Roosevelt's New Deal Town

In the spring of nineteen thirty-four, the federal government did something it had never done before: it bought farmland in southwestern Pennsylvania and built a town from scratch, house by house, to shelter families the Depression had left with nothing.

The community was called Westmoreland Homesteads. The program was part of Franklin Roosevelt's Subsistence Homestead initiative, a New Deal experiment in the idea that unemployed miners and mill workers could support themselves on small plots of land if given decent houses and tools to start. Two hundred fifty homes were built, each modest but genuinely livable, equipped with refrigerators and washing machines, modern conveniences that many working families had never owned.

The force behind the project was Eleanor Roosevelt. The First Lady championed the homestead program with a zeal that sometimes outpaced the bureaucracy, insisting that the houses be built to a standard that would give their occupants real dignity, not just a roof. She visited the site in nineteen thirty-seven as the last dwelling was being completed, and the residents, grateful for what she had done, voted to rename the community in her honor. They borrowed the last three letters of Eleanor and the last four letters of Roosevelt and called the place Norvelt.

The name stuck. Norvelt is still there today, a quiet census-designated place in Westmoreland County, its orderly layout of Depression-era houses still recognizable from the original government plan.

Novelist Jack Gantos, who grew up here in the early nineteen sixties, wrote about the experience in his two thousand eleven book Dead End in Norvelt, a darkly comic memoir-novel that won the Newbery Medal. In Gantos's telling, Norvelt is a place haunted by its own strange idealism, a New Deal utopia that outlasted the New Deal and was never quite sure what to do with itself afterward.