ARTHURDALE, West Virginia — The road into this quiet Preston County community gives little warning that it was once the setting for one of the New Deal’s most ambitious, and most debated, experiments.

Ninety-three years ago, Arthurdale became the first experimental community established under the federal subsistence-homesteads program, an effort to help impoverished families move from unstable industrial areas into planned rural communities. The idea was that residents could combine wage work with gardens, livestock, and small-scale home production.

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First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was the project’s most prominent champion.

Her involvement began after Lorena Hickok, a former journalist and Roosevelt confidante who was then working as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reported on the severe poverty she encountered in West Virginia coal country. In August 1933, Roosevelt visited the nearby Scotts Run coal camps herself.

There, she saw families whose livelihoods had collapsed with the coal economy. Many had worked in mines that powered homes and industry across the country, but unemployment and inadequate company housing had left them vulnerable during the Great Depression.

Within two months of Roosevelt’s Scotts Run visit, the federal government purchased land in Preston County for what was first known as the Reedsville Experimental Community. It was later named Arthurdale, after Richard Arthur, whose farm became the site of the new settlement.

“The federal government purchased the land and built a planned........

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