Published: June 22, 2009 03:02 pm      

Homestead celebration set for July 25

Plans are in the works to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Cumberland Homesteads Community on Saturday, July 25. “Folks are really getting excited about it. We are going to make some history while celebrating our history,” said Vickie Houston, Cumberland Homesteads Tower Association president. “We have several well-known and distinguished guests who will be speaking from the back of an antique lumber truck, like the one Mrs. Roosevelt spoke from when she made her historic visit to the Homesteads. They will be helping us to honor the original Homesteaders and the beautiful community they worked so hard to build.”

Part of the official celebration will be a reenactment of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech that she gave when visiting the Homesteads in July 1934. The Crossville Chronicle gave a detailed report of Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit in an article on July 12, 1934. The planners of the reenactment are using this article to compose a simulation of Mrs. Roosevelt’s speech. Houston explained, “It will be impossible to recite her speech word-for-word because there is no known record of it in its entirety. But the Crossville Chronicle report has given us important details of what she said to the Homesteaders that we can draw from.”

In the article, Mrs. Roosevelt praised the progress that the Homesteaders were making. She told them to keep faith in their undertaking and laid the responsibility for the success of the project entirely upon their continued enthusiasm and their will to make it successful.

C.H.T.A. has enlisted the talented actress Patty Payne to play the part of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for the reenactment. Payne has played the part of Mrs. Roosevelt many times in the Homesteads Album, an original production of the Cumberland County Playhouse and her performance is expected to one of the highlights of the celebration.

Special honor is planned for the surviving original Homesteaders during the ceremony. C.H.T.A. is making a special effort to invite all the descendants of the original families to attend the celebration along with many high-ranking officials and historic preservation leaders from around the country.

The 75th anniversary celebration, which is expected to draw significant media attention, will focus on raising public awareness of the national significance of the Cumberland Homesteads, which is the largest of the 100 New Deal communities planned and built during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The community is recognized in several areas of historic importance including its architecture, which architect William Macy Stanton designed and oversaw the construction of, in the earliest days of the community’s construction. Several of Stanton’s descendants will be attending the ceremony, as well as descendants of several of the local leaders who were instrumental in getting the Cumberland Homesteads Project under way in the 1930s. Watch for more details about the event in coming weeks.