A Place on Earth, A Critical Appraisal of Subsistence Homesteads

Excerpts from the Foreword: The nine subsistence-homesteads projects included here were first established by the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the Department of the Interior under the provisions of Section 208 of the National Industrial Recovery Act. Administration of these projects was transferred to the Resettlement Administration in 1935, and was finally lodged within the Department of Agriculture in 1937 as one of the many functions of the Farm Security Administration. This report has three main parts. Part I gives a historical account of the movements and forces that resulted in a federally sponsored subsistence homesteads program, and contains information concerning the events and developments that have influenced the program on the national level. Part II gets down to specific cases. Each chapter tells the story of a particular project – how it began, what it was intended to be, and how it has worked out. Part III attempts to summarize, so far as possible, the lessons about subsistence homesteads that were learned in the course of gathering information for part II.