Original Homesteaders wanted hope — and a chance
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt talks to Homesteaders on July 6, 1934.
Given the opportunity, they built a community.
As I spend more time in my family’s Homestead house (I’m writing this from the bedroom I used growing up) I find myself studying the very deliberate stonework on the chimneys or the creative carpentry or the gorgeous stained pine paneling. Walking barefoot on the aged hardwood floors is a special thrill that physically connects me with those who came before me.
I’m also more keenly interested in the history of the Homestead area, as I see it in a way I never could before. Growing up here, it’s just where you live. Like the house — yeah, it’s different but as a kid it’s just your house. It’s where you live. Now all these years later, I realize it’s not just a house and it’s not just an area. It’s pretty special.
The Cumberland Homesteads came into being as a small but important part of the New Deal offered to the American people by president Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression.
Out of the melange of legislation passed by an eager Congress during FDR’s early days as president was authorization for what local historian Charles Tollett phrased as a “progressive and controversial program” called Subsistence Homestead Communities and defined by program director Milburn L. Wilson as:
“ … a house and out buildings located upon a plot of land on which can be grown a large portion of foodstuffs required by the homestead family. It signifies production for home consumption and not for commercial sale. In that it provides for subsistence alone, it carries with it the corollary that cash income must be drawn from some outside source. The central motive of the subsistence homestead program, therefore, is to demonstrate the economic value of a livelihood which combines part-time wage work and part-time gardening or farming.”
The program was progressive because it required participants to work together to build a community from nothing and to establish cooperative industries to support themselves going forward. They would also live on small family farms raising gardens, orchards and livestock to help sustain themselves.
In Cumberland County, that “nothing” was 10,000 acres of second-growth timberland south of Crossville purchased from the Missouri Land and Coal Co. The idea was to take carefully selected displaced workers and their families from Cumberland and surrounding counties and relocate them here to cooperatively build a physical community where timberland once stood.
Thousands of families applied for the 250 or so positions. Applicants went through a selection process beyond that of economic need — they were interviewed in their homes by specially trained caseworkers who evaluated the families on character, integrity, dependability and willingness to cooperate.
Those selected often arrived here with little more than hope — the hope of a better life, the hope for a better tomorrow, the hope for a place of their own. And while it wasn’t easy and not without considerable mistrust and misunderstanding, those who persevered were given the opportunity to purchase their homes.
Those homes, the distinctive two-story farmhouses that dot and define the Homesteads area, reflect the connection to the land, using cleared timber for lumber and local Crab Orchard stone on exterior walls and chimneys. The homes also reflect the spirit of cooperation required to build a community.
A Homesteader family would live in their barn while their house was being built and often would share the barn with another family or workers employed to work on the project. (A number of non-Homesteaders were hired to help build the project.)
On moving day, the community pitched in to help. Author Sandra Purcell describes the Peavyhouse family’s moving day:
“They didn’t have many belongings to move but the neighbors formed a line from the barn to the house, passing one item at a time from person to person until it reached the house. When they moved out of the barn, another family moved into it, living there while their barn became ready, and so it went.”
The project was progressive too because it was based on an “agrarian reverence for the land,” says historian Tollett. The agrarian ideal was a reflection of the esteem both Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt held for Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence.
Eleanor Roosevelt had a particular interest in the Homesteads projects and specifically the Cumberland Homesteads. A visit by the former First Lady early in the project was cause for great excitement.
Arriving just before noon at 1 Grassy Cove (near Sawmill Road on Hwy 68), the project’s nerve center before the tower was built, work stopped and everyone that could gathered around to listen to Mrs. Roosevelt speak from the back of a flatbed truck. Her visit gave great hope to the Homesteaders, who hung on her words but were likely more impressed that she had made a point to visit this out-of-the-way place.
Mrs. Roosevelt also pushed for some “modern” conveniences in the houses, insisting, for instance, that they be wired for electricity although it would be several years before the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) would bring power here.
And hence some of the controversy. Beyond the often vehement criticism of the New Deal itself, the Homesteads projects came under fire because the “cooperative” aspect smacked of socialism — or worse, communism.
Some begrudged the Homesteaders’ houses as “too nice,” what with the expertly crafted stone exteriors, stained pine-paneled interiors with exposed stone chimneys, hardwood floors, indoor plumbing and wired for electricity — all on a good-sized piece of land.
But the only thing ever given the Homesteaders was hope. There was a great deal of discontent among project participants over payment with “credit hours” that were to go towards the purchase of their homes, but the issue was ultimately decided and those who chose to were afforded the opportunity to purchase their home and property outright.
The Crab Orchard stone chimney stands sentry in my boyhood bedroom, as it has for all these years, providing me a portal to the world through a window built into its center. The chimney, like the house, was built to last. So was the Cumberland Homesteads — maybe not exactly as planned, but a strong, vital community nonetheless.
Hope was given the Cumberland Homesteaders. Look what they did with it.
rpdgraham@gmail.com
Homesteads Tower Museum
96 Highway 68
Crossville, Tenn. 38555
931-456-9663
cumberlandhomesteads.org