Tupelo Homesteads

The Tupelo Homesteads are a New Deal subsistence colony that the federal government built north of Tupelo between 1934 and 1936, on a 171-acre tract that the Natchez Trace Parkway was later driven through. The Division of Subsistence Homesteads announced a 25-unit community for Tupelo on 15 December 1933. Tupelo was the smallest of the five Mississippi towns chosen; in October 1933 it had become the first city in the nation to contract for Tennessee Valley Authority power. The Tupelo Lumber Company built the first 25 houses between 7 August and 25 October 1934 for $50,600, each on about three acres with a car shed and a pumphouse. The first families moved in during mid-November, days before President and Mrs. Roosevelt visited and toured one of the houses.

The plan was part-time wages in town and food grown at home. Each family received an orchard of peaches, pears, apples and plums, a milk cow, 25 chickens and two young pigs. In April 1936, the month a tornado killed more than 200 people in Tupelo five miles away, the Resettlement Administration began ten more houses, nearly all of brick, bringing the colony to 35 and making it the largest in Mississippi. The residents never bought it. In October 1940, with only two homesteads purchased, the Farm Security Administration transferred the whole community to the National Park Service. Four houses were joined to serve as parkway headquarters from 1942 until a new visitor center opened in 1961 at the colony's north edge, and the rest became staff housing. Twenty of the 35 houses were standing when the district was listed on the National Register in 1997.