Cumberland Homesteads
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Cumberland Homesteads Historic District
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Homesteads Tower
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| Location | Roughly along County Seat and Valley Rds., Grassy Cove Rd., Deep Draw and Pigeon Ridge Rds. |
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| Nearest city | Crossville, Tennessee |
| Coordinates | 35°54′22″N 84°58′58″W / 35.90611°N 84.98278°WCoordinates: 35°54′22″N 84°58′58″W / 35.90611°N 84.98278°W |
| Area | 10,250 acres (4,150 ha) |
| Built | 1934–1941 |
| Architect | William Macy Stanton |
| Architectural style | FSA small house |
| NRHP Reference # | 88001593 |
| Added to NRHP | September 30, 1988 |
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.
By the early 1930s, decades of poor farming practices had rendered many of the small farms in East Tennessee untenable, and the Great Depression had left thousands of coal miners and other industrial workers unemployed. In January 1934, the Division of Subsistence Homesteads chose Cumberland County as a site for one of its "stranded" agricultural communities, in which families were resettled on small farms and would work in community-owned businesses. Most of the cooperative ventures failed, however, and after World War II the government divested itself of the project. The community's general layout still appears much as it did in the late 1930s.
Cumberland Homesteads is located in a hilly area atop the Cumberland Plateau, just south of Crossville. Byrd Creek, a tributary of the Obed River, flows through and drains much of the community. Cumberland Mountain State Park, which was developed simultaneously in the 1930s as a recreational area, is located in Cumberland Homesteads.
U.S. Route 127 connects the Homestead area with Crossville and I-40 to the north and the Sequatchie Valley to the south. State Highway 68 (Grassy Cove Road) connects the area to Grassy Cove and Spring City to the east. The Cumberland Homesteads Historic District, which covers over 10,000 acres (40 km2), includes properties on Chestnut Lane, Coon Hollow Lane, County Seat Road, Crab Apple Lane, Crab Orchard Road, Deep Draw Road, Grassy Cove Road (TN-68), Highland Lane, Huckleberry Road, Old Mail Road, Open Range Road, Pigeon Ridge Road (TN-419), Saw Mill Road, Turkey Oak Road, and Valley Road, as well as over a dozen structures in Cumberland Mountain State Park.
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