The product of several New Deal agencies, these houses were built as industrial homesteads, with the intent that rental occupants would work in local industries part-time and cultivate crops for their own consumption. Construction was completed the year before Tupelo’s largest industry, the Tupelo Cotton Mills [see NE20], closed. The Tennessee Valley Authority then became the employer of choice for homestead breadwinners. By 1937, the development was administered by the Farm Security Administration, which attempted to sell the houses to their occupants. When this effort failed, the National Park Service took over the property in 1940 and made it the headquarters for the Natchez Trace Parkway from 1942 until 1961. Park Service employees continued to live here until recently, and the service is now exploring alternative uses for the property.
The Tupelo Homesteads was the largest of four built in the state—in McComb, Meridian, and Hattiesburg—and one of twenty-three built nationally. Thirty-five houses were constructed, of which twenty remain. Designer Walter R. Nelson, who worked for the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, was based in Memphis, and Frank R. Kincannon practiced locally. Situated on a loop road and several culs-de-sac, the houses each have a car shed and well house. Rather than drawing on indigenous building forms, the designers chose the somewhat incongruous Cape Cod cottage as their model, adding various types of shading porches. Every house came with running water, electricity, and telephone service, and each family received a milk cow, twenty-five chickens, two pigs, seed, fertilizer, and basic farming equipment.