Ropesville Resettlement Project

The project eventually covered more than 16,000 acres divided into eighty-one farms of 140 to 160 acres each, worked in cotton, sorghums and other crops. It stood on former Spade Ranch land, which the Ellwood estate had been selling as farms since the 1920s. In 1943 federal support was shifted to the war effort, and the farmers were allowed to buy the land they worked; seventy-six farms of 146 to 300 acres resulted. The town beside the project grew from 500 people and fifteen businesses in 1930 to a peak of 950 people and forty-eight businesses in 1965.

What the plaque says

Ropesville Resettlement Project The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was enacted in 1933 as part of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program to aid families during the country's Great Depression. The Rural Rehabilitation Division of that agency began in 1934 to work specifically with the problems of the nation's farm families. The Ropesville Resettlement Program was one of 78 FERA-approved projects to help farmers re-establish themselves. Initiated by a committee out of Lubbock (20 mi. NE), this project was located on land near the already-established town of Ropesville. Federal money was used to construct homes, wells, and farm buildings. The first 33 families, chosen for their initiative and willingness to work, settled into their new homes in 1936. By the end of 1939, a total of 77 families were working and living in the project. A community manager, assisted by a home economist, provided guidance to participants in the Ropesville program. The project ended officially in 1943, when the Ropesville Farms came under individual ownership. A community building, constructed for the people of the farms in 1939, was moved to this site in 1959. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Ranching Heritage Center — 20 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 21 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• Buddy Holly Center — 21 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 22 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.

More markers nearby

• Site of Primrose School — 1.1 mi
• Meadow United Methodist Church — 5.8 mi
• Brooks Blacksmith Shop — 5.9 mi
• Route of Nolan Expedition — 8.9 mi