What Was Here Before: Greendale, Wisconsin

The Potawatomi and other Native peoples once held millions of acres across Wisconsin and Illinois, including this prairie land southwest of Milwaukee. Treaty by treaty across the eighteen thirties and forties, the federal government stripped those holdings away and attempted repeated forced removals. By the time European settlers arrived here in force, the land had already been cleared of its original inhabitants.

For nearly a century this was ordinary dairy farm country. Then in nineteen thirty-five, federal agents quietly began buying up those same farms on behalf of the Roosevelt administration's Resettlement Administration. Within months they had assembled about thirty-four hundred acres. Construction crews went to work in July nineteen thirty-six on one of only three Greenbelt Towns the New Deal ever built, the others being Greenbelt in Maryland and Greenhills in Ohio. Rexford Tugwell, the visionary and controversial administrator behind the project, wanted to demonstrate that planned communities could offer working families affordable homes, walkable streets, and genuine green space. The first residents moved in during the spring of nineteen thirty-eight. Greendale left federal ownership after World War Two, but its curving roads, village center, and original brick homes survive almost intact, a New Deal time capsule southwest of Milwaukee.