Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures 20240703

So thered be appropriate for us to talk about the story of norveld, which isnt its its a Great Depression story. About how to deal with the suffering that the Great Depression brought about and i want to first talk a little bit about that suffering so we can see that. Economic epic opportunity fell pretty dramatically. This is a measure of us gross domestic product. So does anybody know what that might mean . Gross domestic product have a sense dan. I would be products in the us in general not imports or exports just products in the us and not just physical products, but all economic activity. So its its an attempt to measure all the academic activity thats happening in the economy. And so and of course, it wont catch everything, but it catches a lot of it and its good to compare across time and you can see that in 1929. Were over a hundred billion dollars in gross domestic product, but that started to fall pretty dramatically so that by 1930 were below a hundred million by 1931 were below 80 million by 1932 were below 60 million and were right about in the 50s, so were probably cut in half gross domestic product. Which means the economy shrank by by half, which is a terribly difficult thing now youre good. So so its what does that mean though . For people ordinary people well, unemployment row is pretty dramatically. Well, i think i have a pointer here that i can use so you can see i dont have a pointer. Laser pointer you can see that in 1929 the Unemployment Rate was 3. 2 percent and thats pretty low. Thats almost full employment. We would say. But by 1930 it had more than doubled to 8. 7 by 1931 to 15. 0 almost 16 unemployment. Thats really really high. By 193223. 6 and then almost 25 by 1933. So thats much higher than anything that you would have seen in your lifetimes or that weve seen since then so by comparison some recent peaks of unemployment in 2000 and 2010 Unemployment Rate was 9. 63 and thats in the wake of the great collapse of the of the market in the 2010 and then in 2020 with the pandemic we got up to about 8. 3 percent. So at its worst were about what we were in 1930, right . So we didnt nearly approach the 31 32 or 33 levels. So thats a really intense unemployment and what that means for folks is pretty serious. Now we are now today at 3. 8 percent. So were almost back down to the unemployment level that were in 1929. So were almost at full employment. Okay. What does that mean, though . For the Human Experience of unemployment and this is scotts run. Is anybody here from West Virginia . You know the scotts run is right near morgantown West Virginia, and its a Coal Mining Community and the lines were shut down. And so that miners were still there still in scotts run, but they had no source of income. They had no food and so their children were really really struggling. This is from 1935. So its after theyve had some relief this photo but this is family from scott throwing the kids. So the Hoover Administration was very concerned about childrens starving and they said that we want to send the Childrens Bureau out to look at whats happening at scotts run and see if we could do something to ameliorate that suffering and they were thinking about Something Like a milk program where they could bring milk to families and children could have milk. So the Childrens Bureau will solicited the help of the quakers social action division. And thats the thats the American Friends Service committee, and they went out to help figure out what was going on. And they when they looked at the extent of the suffering in scotts run, they said that they needed a bigger solution than just milk for kids. They needed something thats more comprehensive because it was such an intense suffering that was going on and kids were at risk. So they recommended something that would ultimately become the Subsistence Homestead Program and they said really to make it reasonable for families to live. They need to have a healthful house and you have us thats a domicile somewhere to live. They need to have enough land to grow a garden because probably theyre never going to have enough income to buy all their food, so theyre going to need to supplement the food that they would get with the garden. They need to have some kind of parttime work at least to some have some cash flow in so they could do something with their money. They would need to have some kind of Community Health services or when they get sick or they have babies or any other kind of health needs and they probably could use a cooperative dairy farm, which would be helpful for folks to sell the milk and also to have access to the milk. And ultimately the quaker is because there are social organization. Theyre very into community. They said what we want to do is transform this individualistic ethos. Into a Community Ethos that would change so we dont were not competing against each other, but were cooperating with each other in order to survive. So i thought when i a fairly dramatic transformation now the Hoover Administration said well that we distributing milk is one thing but having this comprehensive transformation is too much and we dont want to go that far. They said its too much like socialism. So were not were very nervous about socialism. We dont want to have that. In virtually all of western pennsylvania in the 1920s was a heavily republican area. So the all the newspapers were republican almost universally and so they all again agreed with that that we dont want socialism here. We dont want to have anything like that. Im going to talk about Westmoreland County in a bit. So thats why i have that up there. Better to go hungry than to become socialist essentially, but hoover lost the election in 1932 to Franklin Delano roosevelt and roosevelt introduced a whole bunch of different programs that collectively we call the new deal. One of those programs is the one that we want to talk about is, how do you how do you assist people who are struggling in old coal mining areas . So Eleanor Roosevelt, his wife was a really really strong advocate of trying to lift people up to make it so that people could live with dignity and support. And she sent emissaries out to see what was happening in the country. So he wanted to get firsthand accounts from people and some of those emissaries went out to scotts run to see what was going on and they said yeah, its as bad as people say the people really are suffering and we really need to do something about that. And so she thought okay. Why dont we establish . A Model Community near scotts run that could be to achieve all of the things that we talked about with the quakers and the Subsistence Homestead Division. Then become a model that others could emulate another places and eventually this subsistence homestand program established 34 communities. So the first one is in West Virginia near scotts run called arthur dale. The next that there are two in the West Virginia, theres one in western, pennsylvania. Theres one in tennessee and there are 29 other scattered throughout the country norveld, which is one. Well talk about here in west in western pennsylvania. Turn out to be the largest one so but 250 houses in the community. Four of those subsistence homestead communities were aimed at helping out of work minors. So this is we know of big big coal mining region and so one one of the was to allow. Stranded Industrial Workers people who are doing mining not farming out away from the cities to stay in this in the hinterland because the only places at this point that were really helping providing unemployment relief and food where the cities so you would go to the city the city would try and feed folks who are unemployed within the city who are struggling we didnt have a National Program yet. We didnt have statewide programs. But but you dont want everybody coming in from the rural areas into the city because it would overwhelm the system and the systems were already overwhelmed. So this was a really bad situation. So if we could develop these communities these satellite communities out in the rural areas. That would keep the coal miners in western, pennsylvania in West Virginia and tennessee, then they wouldnt be coming into the cities then they could allow themselves to succeed. They could we could make it possible for them to live with dignity and to live healthful and secure lives. So arthur dale was the first and i want to invite you to look at this image and this is the arthur dale. This is a house that was built in the orthodale community. What strikes you about this house or . Anything from that image that you want to observe or make note of does it look huge . Is it a mansion remember we looked at those Steel Workers homes . And the the superintendents homes and homestead pennsylvania is this which one is it more . Like do you think . John looks like you know a pretty average home i guess for the time on i know we talked about it last time with the cole families you would shove like two families usually in a house. I dont know if its kind of like that with this but no, so these would be one of the ideals was that each familys have its own house. So this wouldnt be a duplex but rather than individual house. For cold mining families can you see the outbuildings at all . And if i can get this other way that thing doesnt work and im not supposed to stray beyond this point, but theres to the left of the to the left of the house. You can see an out building. Looks like a smaller house maybe and behind it. You can see a grape arbor. Coming out from the back. So the idea was a families would be able to grow grapes and then use those for jams and jellies to eat themselves and then behind you can see a garage in the back as well. Arthur dale was the first of the communities and so all of the problems got sort of manifest in arthur dale and then got sort of in the other communities. So one of the things they want to move quickly in arthurdale. They bought prefab houses that were originally designed to be vacation homes or cottages on the seashore in new england, so they were not insulated. They were used only in the summer months typically. And so they bought them in mass and they were having them shipped down here, but as they were waiting for them to ship down they dug out the the foundations for the houses, but when the house is arrived it turned out that the foundations didnt match the houses. They had to redig foundations, and they had to readjust some of the houses. They had to insulate the house because they werent very well insulated. They had to do a lot of adjustments that sort of were awkward and expensive. Transitions on the move, but arthurdales where they figured all of that stuff out. Heres another image of one of the arthur dale. Houses i remember the the house is pretty small. Its only about 700 to 800 square feet. So thats not a very big house probably two bedrooms a bathroom. Side porches so that you can go out and not get wet in the rain you could you could get some shade. Tigard valley is also a place in West Virginia which was for unemployed coworkers. Coal miners you can see in tigard valley. Thats got a dutch kind of a dutch barn design. Each of the communities was supposed to be designed to be i want to say reminiscent, but thats not the right word of the region from which they came so that it would reflect in some way the culture of the region in which the community was built. And this is what the larger stretch of community was. There we go. You can see the different houses. In the back, some of them are not the dutch barn design, but in the back you can see that some of them are. Usually about five or six different House Designs within a community. Cumberland homes, tennessee was another Coal Mining Community. This is again. This is a house for one Single Family two bedrooms. Maybe three bedrooms living room kitchen on that first floor. It looks i well. Whats your impression of this house . I shouldnt impose. Mr. House you you would hate to live in . Lindsey tomorrow like just like a typical. Modern Family Household so it would it would fit in with today something today. Yeah might be a little bit smaller, but i think youre right. Its an attractive design. Its made a stone dandy. Do you want to jump in with it . Something i would the heartbeat it looks nice. Yeah, yeah. So cumberland homes in tennessee was also for coal miners and just as an aside has anybody in here ever heard of johnny cash the singer he grew up in a subsistence Homestead Community in arkansas. So he also lived in the substance home said not one of these four. Not one of these for though so westmoral at homesteads is the norvelt thats right around here and well talk about how it got its new name in a little bit. And you can what strikes you about this . This is a kind of a longer range view of the norveldt community or westmoreland homesteads. Does anything strike you in that imagery . And what point you first here to the Resettlement Administration that says here the subsistence the new deal had a whole bunch of different organizations and they kept reshuffling them. So the Subsistence Homestead Division became part of the Resettlement Administration. There were about 34 subsistence homestead communities built, but the Resettlement Administration had about another 70 or so, so theyre over a hundred. Communities built through the Resettlement Administration the subsistence homestead and there were still some other organizations that were building from the federal government as well. All right. Im gonna point you things that might not seem. Very meaningful. What is is this thing right here . So telephone pole its like a telephone pole. So probably that means that they had well, im sorry. Power so it could be electrical. It could be electrical lines and they also had phones they had phones and electricity. So thats and thats a big deal because the patch communities they were coming from often didnt have those things. Anything else about the houses or about the neighborhood . Does it look attractive to you feel like yeah, you would live there dans gonna live in cumberland, but youre gonna live live here at western, pennsylvania. Yeah, all right. Okay, so why Westmoreland County . Why do they build a community . Why do they choose and this is not very far from Saint Vincent campus about five miles from our campus. Why did they choose to build here part of it was that . There is a great need in western, pennsylvania so you can see that by two minutes Coal Production in about the World War Two where shes been world war one error was about 35 million tons in Fayette County and then about 30 in Westmoreland County, but by 1932 they were down to a third of that so they had really the production of Coal Production had declined very very dramatically in this period of time. And so these coal miners were out of work at one point. There were 500,000 coal miners in america and was down to about 200,000 actively working during a Great Depression. So there was a real concern about people being out of work. In Westmoreland County in 1933, so that was the peak of the unemployment that we saw in the last graph. 52 of people were fully employed 21 were under employed. Well talk about that in a second and about 27 were unemployed entirely. So 20 its even higher in Westmoreland County than it was in the nation as a whole but an underemployed person if somebody who wants to be working fulltime and cant work full time because theres not enough opportunity or the jobs dont have enough hours and one example would be the Us Steel Corporation was reluctant to lay off workers out right . So they said we want to employ people we want to spread out the work among all the employees, but that meant that of the period in 1933 the typical steel worker worked one day every other week, so they only got one out of 14 days that they were able to work and you just cant support a family or even yourself on one day a week. So those would be under employed folks. If you add the unemployed and the underemployed you have almost half the population of eligible workers who want to work who dont have a job who arent going to be able to do it. So this is a really this is a place of a suffering really badly and as evidence i want to i want to look at what was it like calumet is a western, pennsylvania colfax community. And coal patches what they call the small communities that were built around a mine entrance the shaft entrance. What strikes you about this photo . And we just were looking at the homestead photos . And looks pretty run down. It definitely doesnt look as nice. You just showed us. And i dont know if you can tell but this is actually a duplex. So thats half thats another family over there. And then these guys are over here. So youre saying it looks like its more run down than the other. Okay . Like the other houses you showed us earlier in the year. Yeah, yeah. The you would you would move from here to one of those other houses, you know. And this is this is a house where people actually still are able to stay within their home and a lot of times the miners were evicted from their homes. Once the mind shut down. I think this is the backyard of the house you can see on the wash tub hanging up on the wall over here. You can see that theres an attempt to have a garden. Whoops. I lost my anyway, theres a garden as we look in between the two you can see theres a garden with some tomato plants, i think growing and then on the right is mostly flowers. Folks from calumet would be eligible to come to norvell. So these are folks that who might be willing to move or certainly be willing to move and they might try and get into normal. This is a cocommon. And we talked about cocoons a little bit before but the coke oven the the steel mills want to source of fuel. That burns at a High Temperature and an relatively even temperature for making steel the coal that comes out of the mines particularly the bituminous coal that comes out of the mines. Has a very has a lot of impurities in it and it has an uneven the temperature will spike and itll come down and itll spike and so what the Coal Companies would do is they would turn the coal into coke and then the coke is what the steel mills would use for the fuel. In order to do that they would put the coal into this coke oven and they would brick up the front of that. They would close that entire hole with brick. And then they would cook it for a couple of days in there and then the impurities would come out through a hole in the roof through a chimney and then at the end of a couple days, theyd break down this brick and then they would be able to pull out the coke and then they would put the coke on the trains that would then go to the steel mills. But the coke ovens were idled because the mines were idled and so there was nobody really working. And these cloak governs were empty. So people who didnt have homes were moving into the covenants. So we had People Living in the kokomans. You could see this woman is somebody who was living in the coke oven at that time. And it was really hard for people who didnt have homes to find places. We also saw People Living in caves in western pennsylvania or just or living outside in tents. It was a really it was a great struggler a lot of unemployed and a lot of Homeless People in western, pennsylvania. Okay. Heres a typical western, pennsylvania coal mining. Family how many children . Six kids and then two parents. So remember these will look at the floor plan in a little bi but these would be two bedroom houses living room kitchen and two bedrooms above so thered be a lot of people together in a bedroom be a little bit crowded. Quality of the inside of the house or the furniture sydney youre shaking your head. What do you mean . Like the best quality just to get so it looks older or order run down maybe some chipping paint along the the bed, okay. Im sorry. Standard issue three it does look like it could be. All right. The walls you can see that there are some holes in the walls. They have the kneehigh under so you can see the calendar. Oh and i my pointer. Oh, there it is. The high is a soda company, so they would have a calendar you could hang up and you could use that as to patch a hole in the wall if you can hang it. Calendar in front all right, Eleanor Roosevelt was the wife of Franklin Delano roosevelt, and she was really powerfully invested in this in improving peoples lives. And so she became a great champion of the subsistence homes that communities and she was like the sponsor for the arthurdale community. She invested a lot not only of her time coming to arthur dale on a regular basis. She went to every High School Graduation in arthur dallas. He was out there multiple times a year, but she also invested a lot of her personal wealth in arthur dale trying to make things work. So she she really was a mover in the subsistence Homestead Movement in the division and she was a strong advocate in a number of ways in order to build houses cheaply. You can do that more efficiently if you dont put a bathroom in and if you dont put a kitchen in if you dont have plumbing, you dont have electricity you can make those houses for much less money and a number of people in the Roosevelt Administration were saying these folks are coming from coal mine patch communities. They dont have electricity now they have an outhouse now, they dont have indoor plumbing. Now, why would we provide all of those things for them in this subsistence homesick community, but she said no. No we have to provide houses with indoor toilets with Running Water in the kitchens. Furnaces for Heat Electricity and these are the things that would allow somebody to live with dignity. So shes an advocate of the cooperative ethos and this Subsistence Homestead Division, but so is Clarence Pickett who was the quaker in charge of those four communities that we looked at the the four coal mining communities. So hes the guy whos the administrator the federal administrator hired by the federal government to run these communities from washington dc. He also maintained his job as the head of the American Friend Service Committee the quaker of social action division, so we had two jobs during that period of time so hes a powerful player also in the development in this all right, so i want to take a look at the the map of norvelt and see if i can get my thing going again. You can see in the upper left corner. You can see the state of pennsylvania, and i dont know why i dont always get this and then here we go. This is Westmoreland County which is in the southwestern part of western, pennsylvania. This is Westmoreland County and large and then within Westmoreland County is norvell. You can see latrobe is right there and then here is the street. Map of norvelt. So what strikes you about the street map . John pretty crowded theres like everythings right next to each other. It seems like especially if we dont know the scale. Yeah, right like so how and this is a question. How big so do you see the plots of land those . Yeah. Trying to get i cant do that. Each of those plots is between two and five acres. So it turns out to be a fairly large stretch of area of land. Im going to contrast it with this is this is the street plan of a cold Patch Community in western, pa. To whats different between these two . Communities and norvelts more spread out and the cold Patch Community is packed in like sardines much closer packed in and you can see if i could get this thing to work consistently and i dont know why i cant oh, there we go. Each of these dark things is a house and then thats the plot that the house is on you can see that they are packed in right much more closely the norveld houses, which dont really its harder to see each little dot at the front of these is the norveld house. They have their expansive land behind them. There isnt really much of an expansive land here in the cold patch. Anything else strike you one of them is a is a grid right rectangular grid and the other one is not any idea why that might be think about where you live now, is it a grid or is it . Curvy linear streets or neither i suppose. There is a movement in city planning in the early 20th century called the newtown movement and they thought that the curvilinear streets were a much more pleasant way to live so that you didnt that this was too factory like this sort of the grid was very very rudiment. It was very regimented and it was not as appealing for people so they recommended the curvilinear streets and you can see that in a lot of the different communities that were built that were planned in the early 20th century. Here is actually. The design made in washington dc for what a substance homestead plot might look like i dont know if you can make out the words and all here. Here we go. But can you read that . Things yeah. Yeah, so this heres the house. Lets start with that. Thats the house and then to write to the next to the house. The aim was to have an orchard of fruit trees. Right next to the house so that those fruit trees could then feed the family you would have access to apples or whatever other fruit trees that you would have pears. Whatever. Behind the orchard. Can you see i dont know if you can make that out. Chicken yard. Yeah, the idea was that you would have a chicken coop right here, and then the chickens could run free in the chicken yard, and you would have eggs then so each family would have fruit from the trees and would take a while for those trees to mature and to produce fruit, but eventually the fruit from the trees you would have eggs from the chickens. And then on to right directly behind the house. I dont know if you can see that at all. Right here. Vegetable garden and it says here a half of an acre i think. Or even a quarter of an acre but theres also on here. Theres more theres strawberries deer berries, and i dont know if anybody but the deerberry is im not sure, okay. On the woods, but theyre just eat them off like candy. Do you know that for sure dan or okay. All right, and then the and then asparagus so theyre saying you this is going to be the households garden. So this garden is going to feed the household. But then if you look beyond that garden and you can see im not getting it. This is what they call a truck crop a half of an acre. You could also grow food that you intend to sell somewhere so you could generate some income for your house by growing food that you would sell in the trobe. Were in greensburg or somewhere. You could get money for the food and then finally at the top thats a pasture and the idea here was that you would have about an acre per cow. This is one and a half acres that could sustain a cow and a half. But you might get the milk then from the cow. So and theres a garage which i just lost. There we go. Theres a garage right back here. So the house is here. The garage is here. And then the cow would be back here. But thats not exactly how norville came out. This is actually the plan for norvelt. So this would be a household in norvelt. This is the house. Thats the garage and this would be a driveway up to the garage. This is the street here and that street would have gone right in front of this house right here. What is this here . Can you read that . That might be a little bit tougher . We need front row people with good eyes who can read that. I those will field disposal field what you have any ideas what that might be . Almost like a compost field. Take your account. Thoseable garbage through it there let it break down so that way you can have homemade fertilizer for your garden. Okay. A little bit if i could take you one more level down. Yeah, what might that be . The place where you can help your trash. What kind of trash might go into disposal field . No ideas. Waste, yeah human waste right . So the old the cat the coal pats communities had outhouses. They dont have ads theyve indoor toilets, but they dont have a sewer system to hook up to and so theyre dispersing all of the human waste waste into this field here. So you dont want to grow your garden in there . You want to grow your garden back a little bit farther. And so the garden would end up being back over there in norvelt we end they ended up not having a cow in the pasture. Everybody did get chickens and well look at that in a little bit. Okay, and here is the actual design at the time that was built of the norvelt curvilinear streets. You can see that there is town center here. There are a number of things there and well talk about this a little bit, but you can see the different neighborhoods, and i dont know if you can see more clearly here than on the other one each of the dots within each of these plots is where the house is. So the houses were located along the street rather than back in the property of five acres. You could build your house way back if you wanted to and a lot of people would find that appealing but because there was such a commitment to developing community. They wanted the houses to be close to each other. So everybody was just a little bit back from the street 2530 feet back from the street and they were close by each other. So you could interact with your neighbors on a regular basis and then all the gardens would be behind the house. Okay, so thats what norvell looked like. After it was built. I dont know if you can see all that just to keep taking them in your way. I apologize for that. All right. Does anything strike you about this image now . Lindsey theyre very similar. They have only about six different houses designs and theyre all what what style would you call it, or do you have a sense of what that style might be . I just looks like a typical like family home. I guess i dont. I guess thats what i would call it. A family home. Yeah, okay, that seems fair because thats certainly what they were in order to get into norville. You had to have kids. It had to be a couple with children in order to get into normal. It most people look at that say it looks like a cape cod design. But the architect who is from greensburg who designed these houses said they were a pennsylvania farmhouse style, but they seem more like to me they seem more like a cape cod design with this one exception which i think is really curious and im not 100 sure why but you can see here on this house and here on this house. Theres no front door. Theres no door on the front of the house. So the doors are on the sides of the houses. This one seems to have a door. So i think its four out of the six designs didnt have a front door. It didnt have a door that on the front facade of the house. Im going to bet that the house is that you grew up and have doors on the front right so that if youre standing in the street and youre looking at your house, you can see a door in the front. Thats excuse me almost standard for housing, but this was a different design and im not sure why i tried to find figure out why that was i know for other communities some commentators have said the struggles of the Great Depression were so enormous that they were insulating the family against the street which represented the public life and represented the struggles. But you would go out your side door and you would see your neighbor and that would give you a kind of a sense of community. As opposed to the front door. I dont know if thats persuasive or not, but thats the only explanation that i could see for wine to build the house that way because whenever you see a cape cod design. You see a front door somewhere on the front of the house, but not in norvelt. Again, you do have the wires for electricity and for phones. Where are the kids walking . Period you know the street right . It must be a relatively unbusy area. Thats where where their trip, okay. In order to develop that community that was really important to the quakers and therefore the people of norvell they had a whole bunch of communal activities that you could do and they tried to do everything all of the building on their own premises. So they the people who are going to live in the house the future residents actually built the house under the supervision of skilled carpenters and and builders and they also built the furniture that would go in the house. So the kitchen tables were being built in the carpentry shop. And also i know if you can see but theyre on the side there would be the shutters. Were building the carpentry shop as well. And so people who are going to be residents of norvelt. Got to got to do the work on their homes and got paid for it and a wage was a really important thing at that time. So this was a really big deal. And they had to have gardens and the gardens had to be at least one acre. The idea was you were going to commit to doing serious gardening. I know is anybody here a gardener . A little bit an acre. Garden would be big. That was pretty large. My grandparents have a whenever we go to virginia, they have an acre garden. Its huge and its its a lot of work. Its a lot of work. I would think right and they dont have a lot of mechanized tools to help them here. So one of the things we discovered in our oral interviews of residents of norville who grew up there as kids was that they were assigned a couple hours of garden tours every day when they come home from school. Theyd have to go out and theyd have to get the bugs off the leaves and theyre not to trying keep the gardens going and they hated it by and large. They said this were these were terrible terrible things. And so and well see at the end when norveld finally when the house is were sold the federal government sold them to the residents, which doesnt happen until after World War Two people abandon their gardens pretty quickly or its shrink them down very dramatically. Theyre also was a cooperative poultry. Enterprise so that they would have all of these chickens living in the norveld area. In this on this farm in norvelt, and they would try and sell those eggs then and then this the revenue from the eggs would come back into the cooperative community. It would give the people who worked on the farms wage. They would have a job and we also generate profits that would go back into the community that could be then used to invest in other parts of the community. But every house also had chickens so it wasnt like they were hurting for eggs themselves. So they really did want this to sell the eggs somewhere and the biggest consumer of the eggs was the civilian conservation corps. I dont know if anybodys heard of the ccc which worked in the laurel highlands here to build trails and to repair trails for people to enjoy. It was almost like a military camp so it would be young men between the ages of 18. Lets say and 21 who would go live in the woods in these barracks that were constructed for their purpose. They would get paid a dollar a day and they would get fed three meals and the money they were obligated to send home to their families. They went it wasnt money for them to gamble with or Something Like that. They had to send that money home. But the norvelt eggs were used to to feed those folks in the civilian corps up around here. And there was a dairy and beef cattle farm and there was pigs grown in norvelt again by this cooperative enterprise the goal of which was to raise money for the community. There was this is the coop store. Which by todays standards might look a little bit small . Smaller than the giant eagle that you may be accustomed to shopping at but this was a great leap forward. They said because of something that excuse me that you may not realize happened before the typical. Grocery store run would be you would go into the grocer with your list of materials. This is what i want. Youd hand it to the grocer whos behind a counter and the grocer would go around and fill a basket with all this stuff. And then hand you the basket and then you would either say i can pay you for it, or can i put this on my tab and ill pay you at some some day for it, but theres new idea the supermarket was that you were actually going to be able to peruse the shelves yourself and pick out your own loaf of bread and say this is the loaf that i want to buy or heres the can that i want to get rather than just give the list to the worker behind the counter. They thought that this was going to attract a lot of people from greensburg and other places who might drive out to the coop store to buy the food. It turned out not to be the case and because they were paying a living wage to the people who worked in the coop store and because they had some upfront costs and building these things. The prices were a little bit higher in the coop store than they would have been in the neighboring farm for materials or food and some other grocery stores. And so they were always trying to get the norveldt residents to come and buy from the coop store, but the residents could save money by going elsewhere. And so there was always this tension between trying to prove in some ways cajole and in other ways compel residents to come to the coop store so that everybody can flourish within the Community Never quite worked out. One of the elements of the subsistence Homestead Community was youd have those gardens and you would feed much of your family from the gardens, but there was a hope that you could have a factory in the community as well and that people could work at least parttime in the factory and by doing that they would have some cash income and they could use that cash income to then buy clothes or to do to do whatever but it was really hard during the midst of the Great Depression to attract a factory to come set up shop here in norvel. They eventually got a garment factory to come in and that garmin factory. So the federal government actually built the factory for the garment manufacturer and then the garment manufacturer came in and ran the fact you had to pay prevailing wages couldnt undercut the wages of the worker. So it was going to be helpful to the workers. That Garment Industry really finally took off as with the runup to World War Two and they started needing uniforms for the military. The garment factory was able to produce a lot of those uniforms and so norville finally got underway at one point the garmin industry was employing about a hundred women. It was women were working in the garment factory 100 women from norvelt norville to had 250 homes. So its fewer than half of the households provided somebody who could work in the garmin industry, but it was there and it was a going concern for a while. It did burn down later. And so the Garment Industry is gone. The factory is gone. I had a mothers club. So the idea was that the mothers would get together and they would interact with each other and they could raise money and they could work for good causes and help the local Elementary School, they built an Elementary School in norvelt as well. And they had something called study groups to this whole notion. Remember the quakers were really big on community and in social interaction, but thats not the american ethos. Its much more individualistic. And so they had to try and persuade people here the virtues of community interaction. Heres why and so they had these study groups set up that would meet in somebody each neighborhood would have somebody would host the study group and they would meet in the homes and they would read something and talk about it in the group and the idea of transforming culture to be more communal rather than individualistic. They also had community loom and so they would teach people who are interested in. To weave if they wanted to weave coverlets or they wanted to leave weve blankets or whatever for their home. They could do so in the norvelle community loom. They had a annual fare and at the fair people would do group singing. So theyre telling all these activities are trying to bring people together. You can see an image of them singing at the group at the community fair. This was maybe the most popular. Club this was the drama club. So this is the time before television. So and theres no Movie Theater in norville. Youd have to drive quite a ways to get to a Movie Theater, but this group of residents would get together and theyd put on plays for each other. So there was a very popular both for people want to go see the play but also for the people want to participate in it. Its a really active Community Organization so you can see that theres a lot of stuff happening in norvelt where theyre trying to knit the Community Together so that they would be strong ethos of communal togetherness and put a Nursery School in norvelt. So for young kids who could get a leg up on education so they could get an advantage over others. The the wpa hired the Work Progress Administration hired out of work artists one artist lived in norvelt and he did and those out of work artists were commissioned to do murals on federal buildings, which meant mostly post offices. So if you went into a post office, you can see a mural painted on the wall, that would give you the history of that community. And in norvelt didnt have very much of a history because its only three or four years old or so, but they did a the muralist did a mural of the Community Life in norvelt. And in this was the dairy lunch where soda shop that was in the community center. That was near the coop store. So people could come in and get an Ice Cream Cone and they could come in minnesota. And so this was the mural on there and some of it survives till today in hoffers funeral home. I believe you can see the this is the color version of that mural that suggests the kinds of elements that were prized in the noravel Community One of which was Community Baseball most local communities had a Baseball Team that competed against other local communities and norvelt was no exception and that was a way to provide identity. I think almost in a way that today in western pennsylvania the High School Football team kind of provides a kind of a community identity. I dont know. Maybe thats a stretch coming from the trobe. I dont think we have a long tradition here of successful High School Football. But at any rate it was a way for the community to gather around and cheer on their team. And so most coal pats communities had them in fact, the Coal Companies would recruit really good Baseball Players to represent their team in the League Competition and those people would often be given above ground jobs so that they could be at their best for the baseball games. The community is a really important thing for communities to to be successful in baseball and the h on this mans sweater is for Hurst High School, which was a local high school. Were in norvelt folks would end up going to high school. Oops, i went too fast. There was a cooperative association. That was run by the residents themselves. So they were the board for the cooperative association. You could see them in a meeting right here notice that theyre all men though. So the Community Board norvelt was all male. Heres a 601 versus 601 is on the name of a house design. This is the one of the larger houses. It has three bedrooms. I think two in the second floor and one in the first floor. So and this is new. This is a later edition that so the forget about that part over there, but what do you see . Here now this is the trees are more mature. So this is taking a little bit later, right . But what strikes you hear like, can you even identify the buildings there . Lindsey i was going to say like the one on the be the shed. I may not the shed the garage the garage and it looks like it could be but it actually serves a different purpose. Wait, that was a good i think a garden tools might end up in the garage at some point. Fewer than half of the norvelt residents had cars and so they all had garages, but they didnt have cars to put in the garage and the idea was at some point. They would have a garage they would have a car that could get into that garage, but they could store things in there. What else is happening . We talked a little bit about it. It looks like a really fancy version of one. Ill say its the outhouse. Oh, that would be a fancy version of an hour house, right . You could have a party in there. No. No, its a chicken coop. So that every family was given 50 chickens, so they could get eggs from there and then they could take any surplus eggs and send them to the coop to be sold, but they had a chicken coop. So and what you cant see here, which had been connecting the house to the garage. I think it comes in a later picture. And by the way, this is the garden so you get a kind of an overview of the garden here, too. Its a fairly substantial gardening. This is the grape arbor. So youre looking at the community through the through the great barber now, this is early on so there are no grapes yet growing a lot of this was an investment it would take years and years for the grapes to the divines to grow and for the grapes and to yield grapes that were reusable. So this notion that this would be useful at some point in the future. All right. What else do you see here in the image . Kelsey does anything strike you got the winding roads that we talked about before, okay. Can you tell what this is here . We saw it in the last picture remarking on. Yeah, thats a chicken coop right there. I tried to replicate this photo about five years ago. And i went to about where this was taken and i looked out and all i could see are trees. So all the trees have grown up and you cant tell the houses anymore. Its its all trees, but let me see if we move on here. Thats the great barber with grapes on it. So eventually could get the grapes on the great harbor. And you can see that not only does it provide grapes, but you could set up seating underneath and so on a hot day youll get nice shade from that and it would connect the garage to the house over here. And notice that on each wall of the house there are windows and well talk about that in a little bit when we look at an interior shot. And this is a mature tree on the left. You can see that thats obviously been grown up. Quite a bit. So this is years later. Heres a kitchen in a norvell house. Any what do you observe in that kitchen . Laura what do you see when you look in the kitchen there . It appears they have a nice box or a refrigerator of some kind along with Running Water like Eleanor Roosevelt promised honestly, it looks like a nice kitchen. The time the floors arent probably what it in shabby like have had at their his house and cabinet space and what looks be like a kind of pot or on the countertop where is that kind of . Right here. Yeah, okay. All right. And whats above the sink . Not two windows. So if there was if they both were open you could get a breeze coming through the room. I know it was really important to the designers. They wanted to be able to get fresh air into the homes. And light and light as well. How many kids would you say are in . Photo three kids it looks like maybe theres a fourth child right there. One two, i think by feet i can tell that is that my accurate with that . Three four children and the mother presumably there. So and a clock on top of the refrigerator there refrigerators possible because they have electricity. They wouldnt have electricity in the cold Patch Community. So thats thats a great savings for them for food wont spoil. All right, so i want to look at a typical coal patch floor plan. You can see that you got the kitchen. And you have a parlor which will be a living room and then right next door. Its a duplex. So right next door the exact same layout and then above them would be two bedrooms exactly the same. So thats very similar to the steelworkers home that we looked at a couple of weeks ago. Heres a norvelt design. So whats different . Were the same about the norvelle design and the cold patch house one thing might jump out at you john. I was gonna say like if were talking in similarities, you still have the living room in the kitchen like they look kind of relatively the same same size for the pictures. Whats different you have a bathroom in the norvell house, which is pretty huge. Thats huge right to have a bathroom, right . Because these guys are going to the outhouse and the cold Patch Community. Okay, and then on either again no front door. Right, so you have a Side Entrance into the kitchen and you have a Side Entrance into the living room all access through a porch over there. And you cant really tell very well. But theres a theres a vent into each of the bedrooms on the second floor and theres events into each of the rooms on the first floor. Theres a furnace in the basement and the furnaces generating heat so that it in the depths of winter. Each of those rooms rooms is going to have heat. Except for the bathroom but how bad could it be to go sit on a toilet when its 30 degrees in the room . Its okay that norvelt residents in their memories say that was pretty tough not having heat in the bathroom. Okay. In the 19 in 1940 the fellow government did a survey a Health Survey of coal mining communities. And they compared but they said is a Company Owned house in kentucky right here to privately they called it a privately owned house in western pennsylvania both housing coal miners. Somehow they forgot or didnt know that that privately owned house is a norvell house that at that point would have been owned by the federal government and it would have been built by the residents working for the federal government at that time, but i thought that was pretty interesting. Where would you rather live . Its a tough call, right . Yeah. But you can get a sense that. If youre in the norveld house, theres a commitment to your dignity to your security your warmth in the winter to your privacy. Those kind of things are really important and in the in the Company House not so much and then its going to get even grimmer still i think. Theres a calendar bedroom that we looked at before. And then compare that to the norveldt bedroom. So, what are you seeing . Between those two but john theres a window. Yeah, in fact you oh i went too far. You cant really tell theres a window here. Theres also a window right here. So there are two windows in the bedroom. So you are going to get maybe some light and some air coming through there. There might be a window in the calumet bedroom, but its not evident from the angle of the photograph that we have. Does it look like the norvelt bedroom is huge in comparison to the calendar bedroom hannah says no. The houses are pretty small still theyre only 700 to 800 square feet. Thats a pretty small house. Right . So theyre not that they didnt build mansions for folks, but is there anything else about the bedrooms . Which would you rather lindsey . Okay. Fresh and clean and same with the furniture and the building and the bedroom so it looks like it would be. A clean sanitary healthful place, okay. The walls in the northville bedroom also look like theyre painted and not paper wall or wallpaper. I think youre right. Yeah, and that might be in part to hide mark the the wallpaper may be hiding holes and things like that in the well in the norvelt bedroom. Its a plaster and lathe and its painted over. Okay. Coal patch kitchen and theres a norvelt kitchen that we saw before. Sydney where do you want to get your next meal . I went out to say the more about now, why is it what do you see in the in the cold patch . What it want my food cooked there. It doesnt seem very sanitary. So part of that maybe the floor does the floor look. Its better to have the tile floor. Yes, okay. For its a source of water in the kitchen in the cold patch house. So do have a well outside . Probably would have had a pump outside right to a well and they would have brought the water in and buckets. To use on the stove anything else yeah, and dont really see a fridge. So but really have electric. Like that, they dont yeah, they dont have electricity. They dont have refrigeration. So thats going to be a drawback, right . How many of you brought a refrigerator with you to school if youre living on campus . Everybody has a refrigerator not everybody josie. No refrigerator. Oh, youre not on campus answer. All right fair enough. Its very helpful to have a refrigerator, right . All right, so normal got a new name. It was westmoreland homesteads. Until the federal government built a post office in westmoreland homesteads. And so there was a competition sponsored by the local residents to name the post office. And so that competition was one by somebody who suggested we take the last three letters of Eleanor Roosevelt. And first name eleanor and the last four letters of the roosevelt name and we combined them into norvelt. Because illinois roosevelt was like the patron saint of the subsistence Homestead Community. Wanted to honor her because of the great support that she had given so they call it norvelt in her honor and if you go into norville today, you can see the Volunteer Fire Department is connected to roosevelt hall, which is a banquet hall. You could rent out for things and they have a big bust black to Eleanor Roosevelt. He really is beloved in the in the community. The roosevelts were great supporters of the subsistence homestead communities. Theres a there was a community in new jersey. For example, that was for unemployed garment workers in brooklyn. Largely jewish garment workers and that community after World War Two was renamed roosevelt. I think was heights town before that, but it was renamed roosevelt so you can almost an almost every state you can find a community named roosevelt some of which were subsistence homes said communities and honor of the roosevelt family. Okay, so did was norveld successful. Thats a big question. Right . Did it succeed and i think the answer is mostly yes because residents did live in security and relative comfort. You saw the comparison between the culpets community and the norvelt house. They did form strong bonds with each other. They were connected to each other and very powerful ways. And that these factors and the building of an Elementary School within norvelt and then the access to the local Mount Pleasant high school. Leverage their children to go on to great professional successes. So the norveldt old timer norvelt tell you about their children who are doctors and lawyers and who are living perhaps in other places, but theyre certainly successful. The community largely stayed put so you didnt get a lot of people leaving norveld. So they were in there and they loved living in norvelt and when they had the opportunity to buy their homes, they didnt they didnt move to greensburg. They actually stayed and bought the homes that they were living in so that the residents seemed to really like norveld quite a bit. And at its peak the factory in orville employed about a hundred women, so there was success in there and supporting families. And the houses in the community of norville remains, even though the coop store the dairy barn the poultry operation those of all gone away. They did not last. But the houses have lasted not if anybodys driven through the norveld area. You can see those houses are still there often. Theyve been expanded almost all of them have been tripled in size or Something Like that, but you can see the sort of the core of the old norvelt design and a lot of those houses. People really like living there. But and then heres the kind of the other side some limitations and concerns. Residents never moved as fully into the Community Ethos as the quakers had hoped that they would and so that individualist individualism really really permeated the community so the community the residents had agitated throughout the entire time the homes were built in 1934 in 1935. They wanted to buy those homes. They didnt want to be part of a cooperative. They wanted to have individual homeownership and when the federal government in 1946 said we want to get out of the home business. We dont want to be landlords. We dont want to run these communities anymore. We want to unload all of these substance homestead communities. They proposed to the people of norvelt that they form up they form a cooperative association that would own all the homes and that people could buy individual shares. So you would you would buy a share of the norveldt community that would allow you to live in a particular house and the people rejected it at the residents rejected it out of hand. They said no. No, we want to buy our individual home. And so thats what they did in 194647 that they bought their homes and almost almost every single home went to the resident. They wanted to stay in norville and they wanted to own their homes. Oh, we just talked about that. Okay. The coop store never really made it. I mean it was always on the verge of profitability and never really kind of made it there. Even though the residents were exhorted to buy from the coop store because it would help the community. They were in pretty desperate straits for the most part so they went with wherever they could get the food the cheapest and thats where they bought their food. And so that notion that you would make that deeper sacrifice for the community to bind the coop store so that people could have earn a wage in the coop store that would help them support support their family it never prevailed. As much as it was attempted to they try to get a healthcare coop going. There are 250 families in norvelt the most they could ever get to join i think was a dollar a month to join and then all of your medical was covered. The most i could ever get was about 60 to 63 families joining the coop and it wasnt enough to sustain it over the long haul. The doctors loved it because they got paid they always got paid when they went out and did stuff. But but it never it never made. It it really needed 200 or more people to belong and they couldnt get that threshold. So that the health care sort of made it. Gardening turns out to be really hard work for those of you who have a garden or who have relatives who have a garden and so to maintain a one acre garden is really hard. So once people bought their homes they stopped gardening by and large or shranked the garden very very dramatically and bought their food at stores. So that whole notion that which i think is a very romantic ideal and a kind of back to the land where you would grow your own food how powerfully independent that would make you it just it was unpersuasive to people actually had to do the gardening there. Okay, and the most important i think drawback is that the quakers had really really pushed for local democratic governance so that you the members of the community would make the decisions on behalf of the community. And there were eventually 250 homes built, but they werent they wouldnt all built in one day. They were built over time. And so it took a few years and when the original residents moved in they got together. And they said we dont want to admit any africanamerican families into our community. We wanted to remain in all white community. And so the quaker managers were sort of struggling because they they did not endorse that but they were really committed to this local control idea that the community would make a decision about who would live there and who wouldnt live there so they allowed that to go forward and said, were going to exclude African Americans but one africanamerican family said no. Thats thats not right and they wrote to the roosevelts and said we need to be admitted to this. You cant exclude this on the basis of race. And so that one africanamerican family was admitted to the community of roosevelt their name was white ironically those were the whites who moved in there. Norveld was built in the mid1930s. We were now almost a hundred years later. That is the only africanamerican family ever to live in norvelt. So no other africanamerican family has moved in and they have long gone. Theyre gone now, so it remained a largely segregated community and i think thats a big drawback for for a federally sponsored community to maintain racial segregation segregation as a as an issue. Okay, finally these two folks. This is lois wyant and then this is earl seville. Grew up in norvelt in the 1930s and they spearheaded the movement to get a norvelt Historical Marker established for the town so that its on the map of official norvelt communities. And you can see you cant see theyre beaming theyre very happy in this image because they love they love norvelt and they want to keep it going that Community Spirit survives. Thats a commitment to norveld still persists over time. And so in many ways, thats a success even though its built on a foundation of racial segregation. Okay. Thats the end of the presentation. Do we have any comments or questions . How many of you have been to norvelt . Just stand oh wait. Have you have you been to norvellosa . Have you been to the golf course or just thats what youve been to the golf course. That was the old dairy farm. Thats where the cows were on the golf course. So do you do you see alex . Can you see the old houses when you drive in there . Can you see the kind of the the core of that . Cape cod design still seem like an attractive community. Yeah. Yeah, you were hesitant there. I thought a little bit. Okay norvell. Just about three years ago put in a public sewer system, so they had to dig out the streets and they had to put in the pipes and the and the sewers and so that now theyre no longer on septic or no longer on the disposal field. But now theyre using the sewers. The community the town tours the municipal sewers. Yeah, lindsay. The house is being like more. They got added on to so like are they still like family homes today . Or yeah more so like maybe like retirement homes. I dont know like no, theyre what an interesting thing happened there. Remember everybody had two to five acres. So as the families as a children grew in the families and came into adulthood. Their parents had this huge plot of land. And so what happened a lot was that they built another house on the land back farther from the first house so you could see the original house there and then you could see like a ranch house farther back and maybe another house beyond that because theres so much land that they had that they built so they were able to keep families kind of in the neighborhood a lot, but theyre singlefamily homes. Theyre not retirement communities or anything like that. Would you rather live in a cold Patch Community or in a subsistence Homestead Community . This is a big debate now because remember that building that norveldt community sounded like socialism to a lot of people and so theres a lot of resistance to it. But the there were 250 homes they were well over a thousand families who tried to get into those homes. It was very high demand. So even though all of the local papers were saying this is a terrible thing. This is a socialism we shouldnt do this the people who are struggling really really wanted to participate in normal and so they had a it had a process by which you had to apply to get in and then you had to be interviewed by these Quaker College students who were working on their social work degrees or something and they would say try and discern. Are you committed to the Community Ethos or a youtube committed to the individualistic ethos. Are you really going to do one acre garden . Do you have this gardening skills to do that . Do you have the commitment to do that . Its a lot of work. They did this kind of ferreting process where theyre trying to figure out who would be a good resident in norvelt and they did have to evict three families who had failed to maintain their gardens and failed to maintain their homes. And so there was inspection so you had to maintain it and while the federal government owned the homes you couldnt make any change to the home at all. You couldnt put an addition on you couldnt paint it a different color. He couldnt do anything like that because they were so worried that those changes would detract from the value of the home that when they do when they did want to get rid of it. They wouldnt be able to sell those homes. But as soon as people could buy their homes, they expanded them they put additions on they change the interior they change the year, they because theyre relatively small. These are pretty small homes, and now theyve become much larger they can even either it was you can do anything. Well you furniture you could put a rug in but you couldnt change the color of the paint while they were white walls on the inside. Youre not you were not allowed to change the paint color. It would be tough. Yeah, so theres a limitation there cindy. I dont know if question, but you we were talking about how i was Like Community knowledge wondering regarding like the black family where they treated differently. The Community Everybody else. The testimony is really curious on here because theyve outwardly say we were fine except that and they gave some examples and one of the examples was one of the sons and wanted to be the the drum major for the Hurst High School band. And they wouldnt they wouldnt the Hurst High School wouldnt let him do it because they didnt want a africanamerican man to be leading white women white girls in the band out onto the community. So they he couldnt do that and when they got to be teenagers they had to drive to dances in Mount Pleasant or other places where they could find African Americans that was really an awkward thing for them in in norvelt itself. And not just race in the interviews that we had with residents who had grown up there. They said everybody got along everybody was comfortable with each other. But there were catholics and protestants in norville, and that was a big division in the 1930s. And so they said we could be friends with anybody and that would be fine, but you couldnt date across that religious line if your catholic you couldnt date a process and if youre processing you couldnt date a catholic and people just sort of knew that that nobody crossed that line that was interesting as well. Yeah, jersey. Churches like within the community then like were there. There were a couple Catholic Churches in Mount Pleasant and nearby. Theres no Catholic Church within norvelt. There was eventually the union Church Protestant in norvelt itself. And they did host. Norveld hosted catechism for catholics and they hosted sunday school for protestants. So you could send your kids in norvelt somewhere to be and indoctrinated into your faith, but there was no Catholic Church right in norvelt itself. All right, and the last questions or comments . And i dont know if you guys know when this would be