Farmstead Resettlement Community

During the Great Depression, millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Within his first 100 days in office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began to deliver on his New Deal promise to Americans. The 1933 Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) launched multiple relief programs, including the Resettlement Administration's Farmstead Project. In Nebraska, eight communities, including Grand Island, were selected for Farmstead sites. The objective was to move low-income families off relief rolls and into subsistence homesteads.

Grand Island's "Lucky Ten" families were announced in April 1935. The 20 adults and 34 children shared communal buildings including showers, restrooms, laundry, a canning house, and a roadside market to sell produce grown on the 160-acre site. Each family received a four-room cottage, small barn, chicken house, 7-acre tract, 2 cows, 100 hens, 300 chicks, and seed. Individual farmsteads, valued at $2,500, had 15-year payment plans. Unique to Grand Island was a 1936 Nebraska Supreme Court ruling that District 28 school could not refuse the admit the 24 school-age farmstead children. The Grand Island Farmstead Cooperative Association was dissolved in March 1939.