Jersey Homesteads

Jersey Homesteads Community Building and School Doors, c. 1938 (1/2)

Otto Wester (1902–1988)
Hand-hammered embossed aluminum
Collection of the Roosevelt Public School

Commissioned by the Resettlement Administration’s Special Skills Division for the Jersey Homesteads Community Building and school, these doors depict scenes of the town’s field hands and garment workers. Otto Wester was a metal designer who worked with Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958) on his best-known piece: the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, a utopian model predicting what the world would look like 20 years in the future.

The school doors were permanently removed from the building’s exterior during a renovation project and are normally displayed in the Roosevelt Public School. For generations the children of Roosevelt have started and ended their school days walking beneath Ben Shahn’s mural, past Lenore Thomas’ The Seamstress, and by Wester’s doors. The fact that these doors are part of everyday school life is evidenced by the graffiti scratched in by students.

Jersey Homesteads Community Building and School Doors, c. 1938 (2/2)

Otto Wester (1902–1988)
Hand-hammered embossed aluminum
Collection of the Roosevelt Public School

Commissioned by the Resettlement Administration’s Special Skills Division for the Jersey Homesteads Community Building and school, these doors depict scenes of the town’s field hands and garment workers. Otto Wester was a metal designer who worked with Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958) on his best-known piece: the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, a utopian model predicting what the world would look like 20 years in the future.

The school doors were permanently removed from the building’s exterior during a renovation project and are normally displayed in the Roosevelt Public School. For generations the children of Roosevelt have started and ended their school days walking beneath Ben Shahn’s mural, past Lenore Thomas’ The Seamstress, and by Wester’s doors. The fact that these doors are part of everyday school life is evidenced by the graffiti scratched in by students.

Otto Wester working on repoussé aluminum doors, 1937

Ben Shahn papers, 1879–1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

The doors in their original location seen here as the backdrop to the Roosevelt Public School graduating class of 1953

Estate of Sol Libsohn.

From left to right: Elaine Cohen, Bruce Levin, Harriet Frank, Bob Baker, Vera Baker, Arthur Shapiro, Judy Libove, Principal Mills, Myra Fischer, Simon Katzenellenbogen, Marcia Mondlin, Carl Lowenthal, Willa Noveck, Sara Libsohn.

The Founding of Jersey Homesteads

As part of the New Deal, the government developed a plan to move workers from overcrowded urban areas to places where they could support themselves with subsistence farming. In response to this effort, Benjamin Brown, a developer and social idealist, reached out to prominent Jews like Albert Einstein to endorse his plan for a cooperative town in New Jersey. The government moved forward with Brown’s proposal and in 1933-34 purchased eight adjacent farms near Hightstown. In 1935 Jersey Homesteads came under the control of the newly created Resettlement Administration, and soon applications were opened for 200 homesteaders.

Jersey Homesteads was unique among resettlement communities. First, it was planned as a three-part cooperative made up of a farm, factory, and store. Second, it was the only resettlement town that specifically recruited a homogenous demographic: Jewish garment workers.

Scene along Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, a section from which many of the New Jersey homesteaders have come, December 1936

Photograph by Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-005677]

Mrs. Nathan Katz, an accepted applicant to Jersey Homesteads, in her apartment, East 168th Street, Bronx, New York, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011044-M2]

Interviewing a Jersey Homestead applicant, June 1936

Photograph by Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-002110-C].

Out of 800 applications, 120 families were selected as homesteaders. All were Jewish and 90% were immigrants—the majority born in Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania.

“Where New Deal Raises ‘Little Soviet’ – Tugwell Hands out $1,800,00 for N.J. ‘Commune,’” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 7, 1936.

The cooperative structure of Jersey Homesteads was not palatable to all. Largely socialist, immigrant, and Jewish, early homesteaders experienced discrimination. Store owners in nearby towns would not sell to them, and nationally, newspapers questioned the government money spent on their new community.

Building Utopia

A defining feature of Jersey Homesteads was the avant-garde architecture. Influenced by the Bauhaus and International Style, architect Alfred Kastner (1901–1971) and his assistant Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974), avoided any extraneous ornamentation in their design. A celebration of modern materials, they were built out of concrete block, stuccoed, and painted white. The floor-to-ceiling windows and flat roofs made them look futuristic compared to the gable-roofed farmhouses of Monmouth County. A 1938 Works Progress Administration publication explained that the homes were built “for efficient, comfortable and gracious living...equipped with modern conveniences unknown in even the better class tenements.”

Just as the socialist nature of the cooperative colony drew criticism, so did the Modernist architecture. And while the new houses had modern kitchens, parquet floors, and lots of natural light, not everyone embraced the design. Some had expected country cottages and felt that they were instead renting, what one newspaper called, “commodious garages.” The flat roofs proved problematic with accumulation of rain and snow, and the windows provided a generally bleak and muddy vista devoid of the lush greenery that has grown up around the town today.

First concrete slab cast at Jersey Homesteads, November 1935

Photograph by Carl Mydans (1906–2004), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-000-615-D].

Engineers on the Jersey Homesteads project planned to prefabricate homes with a new process of casting the entire side of a house (including window and door frames) in concrete. Roofs, too, were to be one slab. Four factory buildings were erected to mix, pour, and dry the concrete. Projections promised the construction of five houses a day. However, the prefabricated walls proved impossible to secure to one another, and the plan was abandoned.

Cinder Block construction of houses, Jersey Homesteads, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011030-M5].

After quietly abandoning the concrete slab walls, engineers switched to concrete cinder block. Kastner was hired after this initial failure to salvage the project. Between 1935 and 1938, WPA workers built 146 houses, a factory, a school, a borough hall (now a residence), water works, and a sewage treatment plant.

A model Jersey Homesteads home, nearly completed, June 1936

Photograph by Dorothea Lange (1895–1965). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-009107-C].

By July 1936, eight residential units were completed, with another 96 ready by the end of 1937. Each home was allotted a half acre, with the idea that families would plant vegetable gardens of their own, although few homesteaders showed any interest in doing so.

Preparation of mortar for fresco painting in the Jersey Homesteads school, 1937

Photograph by Ben Shahn (1898–1969). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-006529-M2].

Alfred Kastner was a close friend of Ben and Bernarda Shahn and it was Kastner who suggested the idea of a mural for the Jersey Homestead school. With Bernarda as his assistant, Ben began work on the mural in November 1937, and finished it in May 1938.

The School & Community Building

Opened in 1937, the Jersey Homestead community building and school consisted of classrooms, a library, and a gym/auditorium. Unlike most planned communities, the school—not the factory—was located in the center of town. In addition to the enormous mural by Ben Shahn and the striking doors fabricated by Otto Wester, the school housed The Seamstress, a sculpture by Lenore Thomas. The building’s central location, coupled with the art that was commissioned for the betterment of the children and community, demonstrates the value given to art and education by Kastner and the Resettlement Administration.

Library in the community building, May 1938

Photograph by Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-026326-D].

The library in the school and community building was for all homesteaders. Lenore Thomas’ The Seamstress is visible beneath the staircase.

Mural painted by Ben Shahn at the community building, May 1938

Photograph by Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-026327-D]

Lenore Thomas working on her sculpture The Seamstress, September 1936

Ben Shahn papers (1879–1990), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Lenore Thomas (1909–1988) was only 26 years old when she began working for the Resettlement Administration in 1935, as part of the Special Skills Division. The resettlement town of Greenbelt, MD, also features her work.

Jersey Homesteads classroom, May 1938

Photograph by Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-026335-D].

The Jersey Homesteads school went through eighth grade, at which point children attended Allentown High School and then later Hightstown High School. The school had its first graduation in 1938. Benjamin Brown was part of the ceremony and music was provided by the Mercer County WPA Orchestra.

Gymnasium at the Jersey Homesteads School, May 1938

Photograph by Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-026336-D]

Life in Jersey Homesteads

Going to the opening of the garment factory, Hightstown, New Jersey, August 1936

Photograph by Carl Mydans (1907–2004), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-000735-M2]

Homesteader in the kitchen of her new home, August 1936

Photograph by Carl Mydans (1907–2004), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-000736-M2].

When interviewed by a newspaper one homesteader exclaimed, “Living in this place will be better even than...going to Coney Island every night!”

Visiting rabbi teaching religion to children at Jersey Homesteads, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011049-M4]

The first baby born In Jersey Homesteads, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Goldstein, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011028-M2].

The Goldsteins moved to the colony on July 10, 1936, and welcomed their daughter in October.

“Woman Seeks Job as Homestead’s Fireman; Volunteers With Men for New Department,” New York Times, 1937

After electing a mayor the homesteaders organized a fire department. When a call for volunteers went out, Augusta Chasan stepped forward. She made national news as the one of the first woman firefighters in America and became known as the “Fire Lassie” of Jersey Homesteads. One oral history recalls that when the local Hightstown Fire Department chose not to respond to a fire in the predominantly Jewish town, Augusta Chasan helped put out the blaze.

Girls in front of the Jersey Homestead Consumer’s Cooperative and tearoom at 1 Homestead Lane, c. 1937

Greenfield-Chasan Archive

The Farm

The farm cooperative was owned and operated by the Jersey Homesteads Agricultural Association and encompassed a dairy, a poultry farm, and general crops. Conceived to support the homesteaders through subsistence farming, it eventually expanded to sell produce commercially and employed between nine and thirteen homesteaders. Determined to succeed, some farmsteaders sent their college-age children to university to study agriculture. Despite the education and assistance from the Resettlement Administration, homesteaders could not make the farm viable in the long term.

By 1940 the farm was divided into eight properties and sold to individual homesteaders.

Wives and children of the farming homesteaders, June 1936

Photograph by Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-T01-009122-C]

William Singer, Jersey homesteader helping to store corn for the dairy herd which is soon to be acquired by the colony, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011037-M3]

Spraying apple orchards at Jersey Homesteads, 1936

Unknown photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-002094-C]

Jersey homesteaders working a potato field, June 1936

Photograph by Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-009108-C].

In the 1936 season the cooperative made $17,000 profit in tomatoes and potatoes.

The Factory

Like their agricultural counterpart, the Workers Aim Cooperative was founded in 1936 and owned and operated the Jersey Homesteads factory. Originally employing 100 homesteaders, the factory turned out suits, coats, dresses, and hats.

The factory struggled from the beginning. In the spring of 1937 Benjamin Brown reorganized factory management and created Tripod Coat and Suit, Inc. Named for the triple cooperative, Tripod designed and produced garments to be advertised and distributed to cooperative outlets nationally. Despite several loans from the federal government and Benjamin Brown, the Farm Security Administration (which had replaced the Resettlement Administration) acknowledged complete failure of the factory in 1939 and eventually sold it to Kartiganer & Co., a hat manufacturer.

Over the years, different manufacturers have operated out of the factory building including the Richard Allen Button Factory, and then Geodesic Domes, Inc., which made parts for the sphere-shaped homes. In later years it was home to the Eleanor Gallery (named for Eleanor Roosevelt) and the studio of Jonathan Shahn.

The garment factory at Jersey Homesteads, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011003-M5].

Described as “sleek as an airplane,” the factory was 100 feet wide and 220 feet long. It could accommodate 300 workers and had an air-conditioning system. At the time of its construction the building was credited as “being the most modern factory for needlework on the Atlantic Seaboard.”

Style show at the opening of garment factory, August 1936

Photograph by Carl Mydans (1907–2004), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-000732-M1].

The factory building was dedicated on August 2, 1936 with a large celebration.

Interior of cooperative garment factory at Jersey Homesteads, showing some of eighty homesteaders at their work and some of the ladies’ coats made by them, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011010-M5]

Closeup of tailor in garment factory, Jersey Homesteads, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011048-M1].

The pose of this tailor appears to have served as inspiration for the garment worker ironing a coat in the foreground of the Shahn mural.

Homesteaders’ daughters are employed in the millinery department of the cooperative garment factory at Jersey Homesteads, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011020-M5]

The factory has its own truck, which makes deliveries to its two rooms in New York, Jersey Homesteads, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011024-M5]

Advertisement for coats made by Tripod Coat and Suit Inc., 1937

Rutgers University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.

This pamphlet was included in the Pennsylvania Co-op Review. It advertised the work of Jersey Homesteads garment workers.

Woman modeling coat, made at the Jersey Homesteads garment factory, at the showroom in New York City, November 1936

Photograph by Russell Lee (1903–1986), Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF33-011034-M3]

The Failure

Within a short time all of the Jersey Homesteads cooperatives had failed. Inexperienced management and disagreements between homesteaders, coupled with the bleak economic market, proved too much for the cooperative dream. Only the cooperative store was somewhat successful, surviving into the 1940s. The failure of the factory in 1939 meant the government could not fill the remaining 80 newly-built homes and began renting to individuals outside of the cooperative project. Ben and Bernarda Shahn were among the first non-homesteaders to move in.

The federal government continued to own the homes, renting them at $14 and $17 a month (about $250 to $300 in today’s dollars). In 1947 the homes were made available for sale to the residents, ending the government’s investment in the community. Despite, or perhaps because of, the hardship and disappointment around the cooperative failure, a close-knit community formed. Many were determined to make this rural farmland their home and remained for generations.

While the entire nation mourned the death of President Roosevelt in 1945, the town of Jersey Homesteads felt it acutely. Without Roosevelt they felt certain there would be no Jersey Homesteads. When GIs returned home from war in 1946, it was not to Jersey Homesteads but to the newly named Roosevelt, NJ.

Roosevelt remains unique among other New Deal communities in that so much of its original physical character has been preserved. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

Air view of Jersey Homesteads, 1936–38

Photographed for the Resettlement Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF345-003894-ZA].

In this aerial view the factory is at the center right, with the streets of newly-built houses behind it.