Eleanor Roosevelt's Rural New Deal Project: The Rise and Fall of Arthurdale
Arthurdale, West Virginia, was the first community built under the New Deal’s subsistence-homesteads program, aiming to give displaced coal-camp families homes, land and cooperative jobs, but it never achieved economic self-sufficiency.
The New Deal’s subsistence-homesteads program launched its first pilot in Preston County, West Virginia, when the government purchased land for a planned settlement later called Arthurdale. Eleanor Roosevelt, after witnessing poverty in the nearby Scotts Run coal camps, championed the project and visited the site repeatedly. From 1934 to 1937, the federal effort built 165 homes equipped with electricity and indoor plumbing, alongside a school and communal buildings, offering families a stark upgrade from coal-camp conditions.
Planners envisioned a self-sustaining rural economy where residents combined wage labor with gardening, livestock and cooperative manufacturing, but the community’s isolation and limited market size prevented those enterprises from thriving. Historians split on the legacy: some label it a costly illustration of the limits of federal intervention, while others stress the tangible gains in housing, sanitation and education for the 165 families and their children. By 1947 the houses were largely sold to the original homesteaders, and today Arthurdale remains a living community and historic site preserving this unique New Deal experiment.
Why it matters
It shows how ambitious government social programs can improve lives yet struggle to create lasting economic independence.
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