In 1934 the New Deal chose Cumberland County for one of its experiments in rescuing stranded workers. The plan was to put unemployed miners and timber hands on small farms, give them a cooperative store and factories, and see whether a community could stand on its own. William Macy Stanton, the architect who had designed houses at Norris, drew the plans. The houses are built of local Crab Orchard sandstone in about fifteen designs, with batten doors and a fireplace or two, and TVA power reached them in December 1937.
Critics hated it. Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia condemned electricity, refrigerators and indoor privies for country people, and Tennessee's Kenneth McKellar complained that relief workers were living better than he was. The cooperatives did fail, the hosiery factory closed, and the farms were too small and the soil too poor to pay. Men left for jobs in Detroit, Akron and Dayton and at Douglas and Watts Bar dams, and sent money home. Of the 351 farms planned, 251 were finished.
The homesteaders mostly stayed. By 1941 only 44 families had moved out, and the houses still look much as they did. The landmark is the Homesteads Tower, an octagonal stone water tower built in 1937 and 1938 at the junction of US 127 and State Route 68, with a museum on the ground floor of photographs, documents and artifacts from the period. Cumberland Mountain State Park, the project's recreation area, lies inside the district.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour