THIS LAND
From New Deal to New Hard Times, Eleanor
Endures
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Marlane Crockett Carr at the town cemetery called Beech Grove in Eleanor, W.Va.
By DAN BARRY
Published: December 24, 2009
ELEANOR, W.Va.
Remembering Eleanor
Map
Eleanor on the Drawing Board, and Today
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Dymple Cockrell looked over historical photographs in what is designated to be the town's museum. As a
child, Ms. Cockrell met Eleanor Roosevelt, who was visiting the town.
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The town of Eleanor, W.Va., created in 1935, still stands as a sign of the government's efforts to fight
poverty.
Library of Congress
Ms. Cockrell, left, with her sister Bettie in Eleanor, which is formally called Red House Farms.
Library of Congress
Trucks provided a kind of public transportation in Eleanor’s early days.
Early spring, in the Depression year of 1935. A poor girl from coal-mine
country, a dark-haired girl of 4, rocks beside her mother and two sisters in a
car moving through the rain-swept night. Soon they will join her father, a
Great War veteran who pads his shoes with cardboard. He has been
working for months on some distant government relief project.
When the car finally stops, the sleepy girl can see only a blur of mud and
midnight. Not until morning does she take in this government project: a
new American town, raised from a field by her father and other men with
families caught in the stalled gears of a broken economy.
The girl is told: You’re home now, Marlane.
Late fall, in the Recession year of 2009. A dark-haired woman of 78 drives
her Buick, a Rendezvous, slowly through the town she has always called
home. “This is an Eleanor house, and this is an Eleanor house,” Marlane
Crockett Carr says, nodding toward oversize bungalows distinguished by
the original pitched roofs. “And this, and this...”
The economic fallout of this annus horribilis, now drawing to a close,
continues: 10 percent unemployment ; tens of millions without steady
access to adequate food; wholesale industry shakeouts. It takes the
collective American mind to another time, an even harder time, when
federal stimulus programs meant more than just bridge repairs and
weatherization; when the government jump-started the economy by
building highways, schools, post offices — entire towns.
Dozens of New Deal “resettlement” communities dotted the country: the
Penderlea Homestead Farms in North Carolina; the Phoenix Homesteads
in Arizona; the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, where Johnny Cash grew up. And
here: on fertile West Virginia land beside the Kanawha River, a community
named after Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the New Deal.
Over the years, these New Deal towns have been praised as a sound
response to paralyzing poverty and criticized as flawed, communism-tinted
social experiments. But in this hard time, as half-built subdivisions stand as
ghostly testaments to economic failure, a place like Eleanor reflects a
government action that worked, and works.
Ms. Carr watched Eleanor grow, from a place planted in mud nearly 75
years ago — well before the Levittowns of post-World War II America — to
a town that proclaims itself the cleanest in West Virginia; a town with a
budget, a mayor, a library, a Dairy Queen. Its development has been bitter,
sweet, messy, quiet, ugly and beautiful, not unlike the evolution of this
country.
Driving her Rendezvous down roads intimately known, Ms. Carr says she
fears that Eleanor’s history is being pushed aside, that someday people will
not know why the main street is called Roosevelt Boulevard, or even why
the town is called Eleanor.
Then again, she says, maybe these are the protective fears of a woman who
remembers how a dark-haired girl of 4 christened her new home long ago:
by flushing the toilet in wondrous discovery, over and over, like a child of
Steinbeck.
“Your eyes,” she says, “look at some things through your heart.”
‘Eventual Self-Support’
In the desperate year of 1934, word spread through West Virginia’s relief
offices of another federal “subsistence homesteading” project. It would be
similar to Arthurdale, a community recently created outside Morgantown
for displaced mining families, many of whom had been living in shacks
beside open sewers.
Detractors ridiculed Arthurdale as a wrong-headed and expensive pet
project for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s activist wife. But as Blanche
Wiesen Cook noted in her authoritative biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, the
first lady had seen first-hand the scrawny children, eating scraps hardly
worth a dog’s time. She held her ground.
More than 1,000 families applied to live in this new homestead called Red
House Farms, about 30 miles west of Charleston, on property once owned
by George Washington. After a vetting process to identify the physically and
morally strong, just 150 were accepted, including the family of Robert
Crockett, who had lost his job loading coal cars in Boone County. A military
veteran with three children, the youngest named Marlane, he was lucky
enough to be chosen with dozens of other men on relief to build and live in
the settlement.
Seventy-five years ago this month, Mrs. Roosevelt visited the nearly
completed homestead with her good friend, the former journalist Lorena
Hickok, whose cross-country reports as a kind of government scout had
greatly influenced the first lady. “From long deprivation the health of the
people is beginning to break down,” Ms. Hickok had written. “Some of
them have been starving for eight years. I was told there are children in
West Virginia who have never tasted milk!”
Four months later, the Crocketts and dozens of other families moved into
this community of opportunity, designed for “eventual self-support”: 150
homes on one-acre lots, each slightly different, each with a chicken coop, a
small garden and that most exotic amenity, indoor plumbing. There was a
hosiery factory in the works, a dairy farm, a canning operation, a grocery
store, even a pool hall. (Something it did not have: black residents.)
The families paid a modest rent to the government that could be applied to
the purchase price. The government expected them to work, grow
vegetables, learn home economics and engage in cultural pursuits, like
joining the band. Their children were to keep clean, stay in school and take
cod liver oil to ward against rickets.
If a family did not meet these expectations, it faced “house notice” — public
scolding that could lead to eviction.
Not everything was idyllic. During another visit, Ms. Hickok heard
complaints about cracks in the cinderblock walls, inadequate closet space,
and a government that saw people as statistics. Mostly, the residents
worried about finding employment beyond the homestead. A few, like
Robert Crockett, worked for the community, in the dairy one day, on the
farm the next.
Save for the cod liver oil, the girl named Marlane loved it all. Picking up
mail from the kitchen table of the postmistress. Snapping beans with her
mother to prepare them for canning. Receiving a doll with a pink bonnet
from Santa, who made his rounds a few days before the first Christmas, in a
government truck.
The first in the community to die was a little boy who had been struck in the
head with a rock; the townspeople followed his light-colored coffin up a hill,
where he was buried by the water tank. The first to be buried in the new
cemetery, under some beech trees, was a woman who had cut herself while
canning. Little Marlane liked to place dandelions on the sole tombstone;
she would tell her mother the cemetery was so pretty that she hoped others
would die.
The town called Red House Farms soon changed its name to Eleanor, after
the tall, approachable first lady. During one of her visits, she gave a pack of
Doublemint gum to a girl named Dymple Cockrell. “I thought I was the
richest girl in town,” recalls Ms. Cockrell, now 83 and living in the same
homesteading house she moved into at the age of 8. “I shared it, of course.”
Sidewalks and Memories
The Depression seeped into World War II. Three soldiers from Eleanor
were killed and buried overseas. The community building called the Big
Store burned down. After the war, the government got out of the
controversial homesteading business, and essentially sold Eleanor to a
corporation of its elders for $250,000.
One day Marlane jokingly told a friend she was going to marry that
handsome sailor down the street. Two years later she did, eloping with
Sandy Carr in 1947, when he was 21 and she was 16. Her father cried and
said, You’re going back and finishing high school. She did this, too.
Eleanor slowly evolved. Some residents complained that others had taken
advantage, selling off property that had always been considered communal.
One morning the town awoke to find on every doorstep an anonymous sixpage letter that criticized various inside deals and concluded with several
plaintive questions, including:
Why is hot-rodding allowed in Eleanor?
Marlane and Sandy, a high school teacher and coach, lived for a while above
a chicken-and-gravy-style restaurant on Roosevelt Boulevard, then rented
one of the original homes for about $25 a month. Finally, they built a house
on the back end of his mother’s property. They had three children: Sandra,
Michael, and the baby, Rebekah, born with a congenital heart defect.
The communal dairy barn burned. The canning operation disappeared.
Marlane’s beloved Rebekah died in her arms on the first day of classes,
right there in the George Washington Middle School. Just 13, she was
buried in the cemetery where her mother once laid dandelions on a solitary
tombstone.
To honor her daughter’s memory, Marlane returned to school and became a
surgical technician. All the while, little by little, Eleanor was changing:
sidewalks, street lights, a community swimming pool. A Fruth’s Pharmacy
where the old Big Store once stood. Even a small shopping center at the end
of town.
Sensing time’s fast passage, Marlane and others saw the need to celebrate
Eleanor’s history while some homesteaders were still alive. She helped to
organize a 60th anniversary party, and a 65th, and a 70th. She began
visiting classrooms, usually around Oct. 11 — Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday
— and talked about the disagreements over the worth of these New Deal
communities, the lingering stigma of having been called welfare recipients,
and the unabashed love she had for Eleanor.
She also served for a decade as a maverick member of the Town Council,
one day unveiling another plan to beautify the town, and the next day
tweaking the good old boys by questioning the large expenditures of the
tiny police department. One thing about Marlane: she spoke her mind.
The Rub of Time
Eleanor government got ugly. In 1998, the police chief and two officers
accused Marlane of sexual harassment, saying she had walked into their
office, raised her shirt and exposed herself. She was 67, and the kind of
woman who refused to wear shorts in public. The charge was nonsense, she
says: clear retaliation.
But the accusations became fodder for national late-night talk shows;
Marlane wanted to hide. When she and her husband reluctantly drove up to
the next council meeting, the Town Hall parking lot was packed with cars
and television news trucks. She told Sandy she couldn’t go in.
In the years to come, the state’s Human Rights Commission would find no
merit to the harassment charges. The entire police force would be
dismissed, amid findings of excessive pay raises and overtime. And Marlane
would feel the democratic sting of being voted out of office.
But on this night, Sandy insisted that Marlane walk into that meeting. And
when she did, townspeople embraced this daughter of Eleanor with shouts
of support.
Marlane Crockett Carr ends her Rendezvous drive through the evolving
American town of Eleanor. Its population has grown to 1,500 — a number
that includes nearly 20 original homesteaders, like Marlane. Its $500,000
budget pays the salaries of a handful of employees who work in Town Hall,
clean the streets, police the town. And unemployment in the county is
below the national average, thanks in part to a Toyota plant and a large
auto parts manufacturer, Diamond Electric.
Over all, things are good. When a business moves out, another usually
moves in. When the town needed a library, students in the vocational
school — based in the old hosiery factory building — did much of the labor,
which helped to keep costs way down.
Still, Marlane senses the history of Eleanor being worn away by the rub of
time. Original houses were knocked down for a bank, a credit union, a Rite
Aid. A relative demolished the house Marlane grew up in to clear space for a
more modern home.
A few months ago, town officials held a 75th anniversary celebration, even
though it was only the 74th. Marlane’s offer to give a historical talk was
ignored, so she stayed home. In her darker moments, she wonders whether
homesteaders like her parents are still seen as welfare recipients, unworthy
of celebration.
But when she thinks of the struggles of Robert and Eva Crockett, both
buried now in the cemetery, close to Rebekah, her eyes blur with tears.
“They had come from nothing,” she says. “They were told by Eleanor
Roosevelt that it would be wonderful — and it was.”
As for that little dark-haired girl, Marlane says: “I was so appreciative. I
always loved knowing that I lived on George Washington’s land.”
Across from Town Hall, where portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt lie on the
floor of a deserted room that is supposed to be a museum someday, the
schools let out. As he does most afternoons, the police chief has parked his
cruiser facing the Dairy Queen, in plain sight.
Its presence announces: Slow down for the children of Eleanor.