Sam F. Stack is ideally suited for the task of writing the first book-length study of this important school. He is a professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown, only fifteen miles away, and his two previous books were about Elsie Ripley Clapp who directed the school from 1934 until 1936 and John Dewey, whose educational ideas formed the school’s philosophical grounding. Arthurdale was the first of thirty-four new communities - in rural area and sometimes near cities - created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to re-settle poor residents in communities near their previous residences. Each homestead was for a single family and was comprised of not just a home, but some outbuildings and land to raise and grow their own subsistence. Only a few of the homestead communities were racially integrated. Arthurdale was not. Many of the original structures all over the country still exist, though many have been remodeled and some destroyed.
Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 197 pages with an index, notes, bibliography and photographs. Hardback with pictorial cover