About Cumberland Homesteads
Historic, Historical Places, Interesting Places, Historic Districts
Cumberland Homesteads is a community located in Cumberland County, Tennessee, United States. Established by the New Deal-era Division of Subsistence Homesteads in 1934, the community was envisioned by federal planners as a model of cooperative living for the region's distressed farmers, coal miners, and factory workers. While the cooperative experiment failed and the federal government withdrew from the project in the 1940s, the Homesteads community nevertheless survived. In 1988, several hundred of the community's original houses and other buildings, which are characterized by the native "crab orchard" sandstone used in their construction, were added to the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.