Strewn across the United States in the era of debilitating depression, the New Deal, undertook a variety of approaches to and solutions of problems not often seen before. In Tennessee, the Roosevelt administration drew engineers and a variety of do-gooders associated with solutions promised by die-hard Jeffersonians, back-to-the-land advocates of all sorts, Quakers experienced through the American Friends Service Committee programs, to address two problems depressing the state's Cumberland Plateau: the need to develop furhter the nearby Tennessee River valley and the necessity of rescuing homeless, jobless, destitute farmers and miners of that area. 


The Pennsylvania architect, William Macy Stanton, was himself a victim of the depression, without means to earn a living and support a family when demand for new buildings—hotels, and commercial buildings in particular—collapsed for this well-educated, skillful and experienced architect. His widespread circle of friends, particularly Quaker friends, brought him to Tennessee to help plan TVA housing. In 1933-34 Stanton was chosen both to design and supervise the construction of 250 family houses and associated buildings settled on a tract of several thousand acres the New Deal would develop at its largest subsistence Homesteads project, near Crossville, Tennessee—Cumberland Homesteads.


Houses, Hotels, and Homesteads guides the reader through Stanton's early years as student, teacher, and independent architect, then directly to an account of Stanton's Tennessee years and steps to develop Cumberland Homesteads, to design the buildings, to train inexperienced homesteaders who would live in them, to build with resources on the tract, milling the trees, collecting the stone for their houses, and even to be masons assembling the local "Crab Orchard" stone into the buildings that still stand on the site today.