Farm prices had slid through the 1920s, and the collapse of a coal industry that had overexpanded after World War I shuttered more than three dozen mines along the run.
The desperate straits of the largely immigrant population that lived amidst the stench of coal slag drew the sympathy of church groups from nearby Morgantown, then workers from the American Friends Service Committee and the Methodist Church.
But when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Scotts Run on Aug. 18 and 19, 1933, the bulbs of flashing newspaper cameras showed other Americans who had fallen on hard times, people on whom the times themselves had seemed to collapse and, in so doing, covered them with coal dust.
In the spirit of her husband’s New Deal, Mrs. Roosevelt thought something had to be done.
Raised in Reedsville
The model community the U.S. Department of Interior would try to establish in Scotts Run was Arthurdale, named for Pittsburgh businessman Richard Arthur, whose twin-towered Victorian mansion stood on land purchased for the project that was about to be sold for back taxes.
But the subsistence homesteading effort, as it was called, originally was known as the Reedsville Project for the nearby town in which current Springfielder Virginia Dill grew up.
“I lived in Reedsville, and Arthurdale is about a mile and a half from that,” said Dill, who is 95.
“I was raised by the railroad tracks, and my dad was a (railroad) station agent.”
Her father, Gaylord Gibson, eventually gave up his post with the Morgantown & Kingwood Branch of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to operate a service station on West Virginia Route 7 in Reedsville.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s travels past his station in 1933 may not have pleased Gibson entirely. He would be a delegate to the Republican convention to nominate Alf Landon to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.
But her visit also brought photographer Walker Evans, whose iconic photo of Gibson’s station with its “terms: cash” sign would be seen nationwide. In addition, the timing of the First Lady’s arrival proved perfect for the daughter Gibson and wife, Lowe, had raised.
Having considered West Virginia University in nearby Morgantown, Lucille instead had opted for the four-year secretarial program at the West Virginia Business College at Fairmont.
“I’d just graduated from college in August (of 1933),” she said, “and in September, I started there.”
“There” was Arthurdale, the community the whole nation was keeping an eye on — and through which, the New Dealers believed would give hope to the nation.
The vision
F.D.R.’s success as governor of New York in relocating unemployed city residents to the country likely attracted him to the homesteading plan for Arthurdale.
The idea this time was to help displaced miners establish a community in which the government would build and sell them affordable houses, then provide them with the opportunity to become economically independent through subsistence farming, combined with work in an industrial plant to be brought to the community.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin captures the basis of Eleanor Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the project in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “No Ordinary Time.”
“Eleanor shared with (presidential adviser) Harry (Hopkins) an abiding faith in the unemployed, a belief that they were decent, honest people suffering through no fault of their own, totally deserving of government help ... (Mrs. Roosevelt and Hopkins) kept in their minds a vivid picture of the lives of these people and that image drove them to push the government to create as many jobs for as many people as it possibly could.”
Nowhere was the picture more vivid than Scotts Run.
The reality
For practical and political reasons, the plan never was fully realized, and it was beset by problems from the start.
The houses shipped in from Cape Cod as the first residences were summer homes poorly suited for West Virginia mountain winters. More crucially, they didn’t match the already plumbed foundations made by the residents.
The resulting adjustments led to overruns, which made the homes more than three times more costly than the average American home at the time. That led to political problems exacerbated by Mrs. Roosevelt’s insistence the homes have electric refrigerators and other amenities many Americans could ill afford in those years.
The project would produce 165 homes from 1933-37, the latter ones more efficiently.
Sensing shadows of socialism, Congress cut short an attempt to have the government install industry, undercutting an assumption needed to sustain the community. An attempt to move the post office’s furniture-making facility in to fill that gap — a business that promised longer-term security — was cut off by an Indiana congressman from a furniture-making district.
Residents then tried a series of failed cooperatives.
The town eventually had a service station and a school of an initially somewhat controversial nature — its more progressive approach consistent with what Mrs. Roosevelt saw as the goals of a model community.
Roosevelt sightings
In her five years working at Arthurdale, Mrs. Dill recalls seeing Mrs. Roosevelt “several times.”
“I danced with her son, John, in square dancing,” she said.
“She really did come here constantly,” said Jeanne Goodman, executive director of Arthurdale Heritage Inc., the nonprofit that now holds tours of part of the old Arthurdale site and hosts the New Deal Festival each July.
The president also came for high school graduation ceremonies at Arthurdale in the spring of 1938.
Mrs. Dill’s impressions of Mrs. Roosevelt is that “she was always looking out for the underprivileged and miners.
“I’d have to say Roosevelt did all right,” Dill added, “but my dad remained a staunch Republican,” just as he accepted only cash at his filling station.
During the years of Mrs. Roosevelt’s visits, Kenneth Dill, an Urbana boy who came back to visit his relatives in West Virginia, ended up paying more visits on Virginia Gibson.
After their wedding on Thanksgiving of 1938, the new Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Dill were scheduled to take the train north to Pittsburgh, but found themselves snowed in.
“They had built a big motel, it was a rooming place,” she said. “And on our wedding night, I got to sleep in Eleanor Roosevelt’s bed. Not many people got to do that.”
Goodwin wrote that two years later, when a tired Eleanor Roosevelt, discouraged by news of impending war returned to Arthurdale and perhaps slept in the same bed, she “came to see the price of her continued support” of her pet project. “So dependent on her had the homesteaders become that when their school bus broke down, they sent it to the White House garage for repairs,” Goodwin wrote.
Kearns said Mrs. Roosevelt confided to a friend that she was “deeply disillusioned” that the Arthurdale homesteaders “seemed to feel the solution to all their problems was to turn to government.’”
Postscript
In a thorough online treatment of the history of Arthurdale, Franklin and Betty Parker report that by the time Lucille Dill moved to Springfield in 1938, support for the project was waning.
“New Deal critics in Congress in 1939 cut funds for the subsistence homestead projects” and “Congress in 1942 directed the federal government to sell all interests in the homestead communities,” they write. (Other aspects of the Parkers’ report are included in this story.)
All the properties had been sold by 1942.
The Eleanor Roosevelt Historic Site in Hyde Park, N.Y., which refers to her in its posting as “ER,” defends the experiment.
“Although the project had long been regarded as a failure in government planning, ER consistently felt proud about the role she had played in engineering the creation of a community. Most of Arthurdale’s residents were far better off than they had been as homeless, unemployed miners and the houses the government built afforded them a dignity that few in that section of the country had known prior to the government’s intervention.”
Mrs. Roosevelt remained in contact with the community, making her last visit there for a church dedication two years before her 1962 death.
Today, all but five of the 165 homes built for Arthurdale remain in use, and in the past 25 years, local volunteers, aided by the occasional grant, have rebuilt the forge and the old Esso station, turned the administration building Dill worked at into a museum, and have made other improvements to keep the town’s history alive.
“Twenty five years ago, nobody was talking about Arthurdale,” Goodman said.
That they are now pleases Virginia Dill. And while it may have irked her father, it likely greatly would have pleased Eleanor Roosevelt as well.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368
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