HISTORIC HOMESTEADING

CCC Homestead Water Tower

“It would be great if a program like the New Deal Subsistence Project of Homestead Communities could be instituted today,” I told the docent at the Homestead Tower in Crossville, TN after watching a documentary at the Tower. She was a descendant of one of the original Homestead families and agreed with me but added, “I’m not sure anyone wants to work that hard anymore.”

Under the regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and with the encouragement of his wife, Eleanor, The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 had created a progressive program called the Subsistence Homestead Communities. It provided an opportunity for families who were permanently unemployed or displaced to purchase small equipped farms. One-hundred homestead projects were scattered across the U.S., and one highly successful one was centered in Cumberland County, Tennessee which had experienced massive flooding during the Depression of 1929.

The Homestead Project was an experiment in community living from which 233 families were selected to participate. They included 30 percent stranded farmers; 30 percent textile workers; 30 percent stranded coal miners, 10 percent labor leaders, teachers, a physician, a nurse, and two sociologists.

In the beginning years of the project, the Homesteaders were paid one-third in cash and two-thirds in credit hours. The credit hours were to be applied to the purchase price of their farms. The Homesteaders worked together toward a goal of creating their own homes from wilderness and becoming self-supporting. The houses built, one of which is featured below, were cottage style homes with 12-inch mason walls and siding of either sandstone or stone. Walls and ceilings were paneled with pine, floored with oak and heated with fireplaces. They were also plumbed and wired for electricity, eventually delivered by TVA. Many of the homes were built before roads and driveways reached them.

Home Built for Homesteader

The program wasn’t a hand-out program and is detailed in depth in a magazine published by The Crossville Chronicle which we picked up at the Homestead Tower, shown above. The Tower, built in 1938, is an octagonal stone tower that housed a 50,000-gallon water tank with a lookout tower at its peak. We didn’t climb the Tower, but we examined the exhibits of photographs and artifacts used during the Homestead Project. The Cumberland County Homestead Project in Crossville, TN gained national notice as the “Showplace of the New Deal.” 

Fifty percent of the original Homesteaders eventually owned their homes, and homeowners had learned valuable construction, farming, and business skills. They had been trained by experts in agriculture, engineering, and construction and assisted by FDR’s boys, CCC and WPA workers (both programs in which my father participated in Louisiana).

FDR once said that there was only one objection he had to the whole Homesteads Initiative, and that was the word “subsistence.” “I wish we could come up with a new term to take its place. This work we are doing is not a matter of subsistence…we want more for these families than that…it is the thing that we have called ‘the more abundant life."* 

The Homestead Project in Cumberland County, and nationwide, ended in 1946, but descendants of the Project still occupy many of the Crossville cottages erected during the era of the New Deal. Of interest to me: Of the 1500 applicants to this program, 233 were selected for “high character, ability, honesty, willingness to work and cooperate.” If participants didn’t measure up under a probation contract of two years, they were asked to leave.  

*Reference from Crossville Chronicle, “The Cumberland Homesteads.”

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

THE BOUNTY OF STATE PARKS

We went over to Crossville, Tennessee to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame enacted by the Cumberland County Playhouse recently and ended up spending a large part of the day at one of my favorite haunts — a state park. The Cumberland Mountain State Park especially attracted me because the CCC had used many hands and sweat equity to construct buildings and bridges in the park using native rock called Crab Orchard stone. The grand bridge in the photograph of this blog is the largest masonry structure ever built by the CCC and is a magnificent tribute to the work of young men enrolled in this program between 1933 and 1942.

I’m always drawn to CCC structures and parks because my father, a civil engineer, was engaged with the CCC and WPA, both organizations being the springboard for his engineering career. When I walked through the CCC museum at the Cumberland Mountain State Park, I “juiced up,” as my godmother used to say about shedding tears, because I thought of my father working alongside a cadre of industrious young men who helped conserve and develop this country’s natural resources.

The CCC was instrumental in building many Tennessee State Parks — a total of 17 — and most of these park structures remain in use today. Approximately 70,000 Tennesseans served in the CCC, and there were 77 CCC camps scattered throughout Tennessee. Their work included bridges, roads, dams, buildings, and parks, as well as conservation and reforestation projects. The structure to which I was drawn was the large stone dam, a seven-arch, steel-free bridge spanning Byrd Lake. A smaller bridge showing its age also offered a photo opportunity.

The Cumberland State Park, a 1,720-acre park, was acquired by the Farm Security Administration to provide an area devoted to recreational use for 250 families selected to homestead on the Cumberland Plateau. The Roosevelt administration established the Homestead Act to aid in the colonization of a sparsely populated section of Tennessee. At that time, the Act, which was later abolished, provided homes, food, and jobs for Cumberland Plateau counties. After the Act was abolished, many of the homesteaders remained in this area.

Other Tennessee state parks built by the CCC include Pickett, Reelfoot, Montgomery Bell, Norris Dam, Big Ridge. T.O. Fuller, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Booker T. Washington, Harrison Bay, Cove Lake, and Pickwick Landing. Tennessee began its park system with federal programs that instigated individual parks, and, later, Depression Era recovery programs fostered the idea of state parks, and they began to burgeon.

We ate lunch at the Homestead Harvest Restaurant in the park and sat by a window overlooking Byrd Lake, which is rumored to hold a bounty of catfish, crappie, shell cracker, and rainbow trout. A group of “white hairs” had elbowed us aside and run for tables with choice window views, but a hospitable waitress, annoyed at their rudeness, managed to seat us at a window where we could watch a flock of geese parading by the lake.

Bridges, rock houses, scenic bluffs, mountain streams, and biological diversity — all have been preserved through the Tennessee State Park system, and I’m one advocate that hopes our present national government oligarchy doesn’t tamper with our remarkable state park systems in the U.S. According to a University of Tennessee study, state parks, especially in rural areas, impact the economy in a positive way, as well as help the health and quality of life of visitors to the parks and residents in the surrounding communities.

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan