Overview

"Strewn across the United States in the era of debilitating depression, the New Deal, undertook a variety of approaches to and solutions of problems not often seen before. In Tennessee, the Roosevelt administration drew engineers and a variety of do-gooders associated with solutions promised by die-hard Jeffersonians, back-to-the-land advocates of all sorts, Quakers experienced through the American Friends Service Committee programs, to address two problems depressing the state's Cumberland Plateau: the need to develop furhter the nearby Tennessee River valley and the necessity of rescuing homeless, jobless, destitute farmers and miners of that area.  The Pennsylvania architect, William Macy Stanton, was himself a victim of the depression, without means to earn a living and support a family when demand for new buildings—hotels, and commercial buildings in particular—collapsed for this well-educated, skillful and experienced architect. His widespread circle of friends, particularly Quaker friends, brought him to Tennessee to help plan TVA housing. In 1933-34 Stanton was chosen both to design and supervise the construction of 250 family houses and associated buildings settled on a tract of several thousand acres the New Deal would develop at its largest subsistence Homesteads project, near Crossville, Tennessee—Cumberland Homesteads. Houses, Hotels, and Homesteads guides the reader through Stanton's early years as student, teacher, and independent architect, then directly to an account of Stanton's Tennessee years and steps to develop Cumberland Homesteads, to design the buildings, to train inexperienced homesteaders who would live in them, to build with resources on the tract, milling the trees, collecting the stone for their houses, and even to be masons assembling the local ""Crab Orchard"" stone into the buildings that still stand on the site today. "

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9781588384782

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Delos Hughes is a native of Auburn, Alabama. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught political philosophy at Washington and Lee University from 1963 until his retirement in 1996. As Emeritus Professor of Politics, he researches architectural history subjects. Hughes has published studies of courthouses in Alabama, Virginia, and South Carolina; a New Deal homesteads project in Tennessee; and an early effort to design buildings for the University of Alabama. He is a co-author of Lost Auburn: A Village Remembered in Period Photographs, published by NewSouth Books in 2012, and Historic Alabama Courthouses: A Century of Their Images and Stories, published by NewSouth Books in 2017.

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