Local Area Info: Norvelt, Pennsylvania

Norvelt is a census-designated place in Mount Pleasant Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, United States. The community was part of the Calumet-Norvelt CDP for the 2000 census, but was split into the two separate communities of Calumet and Norvelt for the 2010 census. Calumet was a typical company town, locally referred to as a "patch" or "patch town", built by a single company to house coal miners as cheaply as possible. On the other hand, Norvelt was created during the depression by the federal government of the United States as a model community, intended to increase the standard of living of laid-off coal miners. Award winning writer Jack Gantos was born in the village and wrote a book about it

As part of the sweeping National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA), Congress allocated $25 million for the creation of "subsistence homesteads" for dislocated industrial workers. Over the course of the program's eleven-year history, the federal government seeded nearly 100 planned, cooperative communities. Norvelt, in southwestern Pennsylvania, was the fourth. The idea for the program was a throwback to the Jeffersonian ideal of a back-to-the-land movement, popularized by Americans who promoted small-scale subsistence farming as an antidote to economic exploitation and the alienation of modern life. The idea gained strength in the 1920s among a wide variety of progressive organizations, including church-related groups such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) which was the social services arm of the Quakers. During the 1920s, the AFSC had become deeply concerned with the violence that resulted from labor strife, particularly in the bituminous coal fields of Appalachia. So AFSC volunteers traveled to the bituminous-coal regions in West Virginia and Pennsylvania to help the families of striking and unemployed coal miners. The AFSC also believed in the necessity of economic and social justice as a means of insuring lasting peace in this section of the United States. To that end, it clothed and fed the families of unemployed miners during strikes, and later launched subsistence gardening and vocational retraining programs. After the onset of the Great Depression, these experiences placed the AFSC in the forefront of the movement for cooperative communities, so much so that the United States Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes recruited AFSC staff to guide its subsistence homesteads program.

The Great Depression was an opportunity to put these ideals into action. Supporters lobbied for the creation of a government-sponsored resettlement program that would place unemployed industrial workers in farmstead communities. Promoted as a relief measure, it quickly became weighted with the much more ambitious goal of cooperative living. In 1934, Interior Secretary Ickes named Milburn Wilson to head the newly created "Division of Subsistence Homesteads". Wilson, in turn, selected the AFSC's Clarence Pickett to help administer the program. As the AFSC's executive secretary, Pickett already had overseen vocational reeducation and cooperative farm programs for unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. The AFSC's work supplied the prototype for the federal program. In the years that followed, AFSC lent its support to the federal program and later sponsored its own cooperative community, Penn-Craft in Fayette County.