Cumberland Homesteads: The New Deal's Model Village

In nineteen thirty-four, at the deepest point of the Great Depression, the federal government purchased twenty thousand acres of Tennessee plateau south of Crossville and attempted something ambitious: to build a model community from scratch. The Cumberland Homesteads was one of the signature projects of Franklin Roosevelt's Division of Subsistence Homesteads, and it was designed to give people who had run out of options a new start on land of their own.

The families selected for the project came from three overlapping worlds of Depression-era misery. Thirty percent were distressed farmers whose land had failed or been lost. Another thirty percent were unemployed miners from the coal fields. A third thirty percent were textile workers who had watched their mills close. The remaining ten percent were struggling professionals: teachers, nurses, a doctor, people whose skills the community would need.

Every detail of the project reflected New Deal optimism about planning. The architect William Macy Stanton, who had also designed buildings for the TVA's model city of Norris, drew up homes and community structures to be built from a locally quarried sandstone called crab orchard stone, a reddish-brown material that glows in late afternoon sun and weathers to look as though it has always been there. Two hundred fifty-one farmsteads went up, along with schools, cooperative businesses, a water tower, and an administrative complex.

The construction work itself was part of the relief mission: local unemployed men were hired to build the community they would live in. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Homesteads in nineteen thirty-five, and the community was built with water supplied from a central tower.

The Civilian Conservation Corps built recreational facilities and a small lake that became Cumberland Mountain State Park. The octagonal Homesteads Tower, which served as the project office and water tower, and scores of the original crab orchard stone houses survive today. Walking through the Cumberland Homesteads Historic District is a walk through a moment when the government believed it could design a way out of despair, and the architecture still carries that earnest ambition in every stone.