Cumberland Homesteads Historic District

Cumberland Homesteads is a community located in Cumberland County, Tennessee, United States. Established by the New Deal-era Division of Subsistence Homesteads in 1934, the community was envisioned by federal planners as a model of cooperative living for the region's distressed farmers, coal miners, and factory workers. While the cooperative experiment failed and the federal government withdrew from the project in the 1940s, the Homesteads community nevertheless survived. In 1988, several hundred of the community's original houses and other buildings, which are characterized by the native "crab orchard" sandstone used in their construction, were added to the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district. By the early 1930s, decades of poor farming practices had rendered many of the small farms in East Tennessee untenable, and the Great Depression had left thousands of coal miners and other industrial workers unemployed. In January 1934, the Division of Subsistence Homesteads chose Cumberland County as a site for one of its "stranded" agricultural communities, in which families were resettled on small farms and would work in community-owned businesses. Most of the cooperative ventures failed, however, and after World War II the government divested itself of the project. The community's general layout still appears much as it did in the late 1930s.