Unknown
The Farm Rehabilitation Relief Plan", 1933
Carbon typescript (33 p,p.) and silver prints (11)
10 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches overall
Further images
A fascinating, apparently unrecorded photographically-illustrated report on a depression-era California relief colony and the potential to implement the project’s structure throughout rural communities across the country. The report contains 33...
A fascinating, apparently unrecorded photographically-illustrated report on a depression-era California relief colony and the potential to implement the project’s structure throughout rural communities across the country. The report contains 33 pages of text and eleven fascinating photographically-illustrated pages, showing FSA-like composite views of the project and its participants.
The report begins by arguing:
“Each great city has scores of relief agencies, and smaller communities have proportionately fewer. However, the services required of these agencies are not proportionately reduced. We find the smaller districts, particularly the rural sections, the least able to cope with their problems. But neither the metropolitan organizations nor the small town and country relief bodies are able to admit they have the situation entirely in hand.”
The solution it proposes is a communal relief colony, and its inception was one that was borne out of necessity the year previous:
“With the approach of last winter an emergency plan was instituted as purely an emergency measure for aiding a number of families and individuals in one of the rural communities in the upper part of California. The motive prompting this particular enterprise was to make some of one man's money, available for charitable work, go as far as possible - farther than the unfortunate people, as individuals, could make it extend, and perhaps farther than through any organised welfare agency. The project, which we shall call the Farm Rehabilitation Relief Plan, was not started with any idea of yielding a return to the sponsor. Nevertheless, it has produced interesting results.”
The text goes on to lay out how seventy-three people, “ranging from six months to eighty one years of age…representing sixteen families, five single men [and] a number of transients” were provided “nourishing food,” a rudimentary shelter for housing, and the opportunity to work.
While the report is quite thorough, pertinent details are left rather vague (as evidenced by the above paragraph). There is no mention of the project’s location, its organizing body, etc. Perhaps, given the communal nature of the colony, there was concern it would be perceived as “Un-American.”
The report begins by arguing:
“Each great city has scores of relief agencies, and smaller communities have proportionately fewer. However, the services required of these agencies are not proportionately reduced. We find the smaller districts, particularly the rural sections, the least able to cope with their problems. But neither the metropolitan organizations nor the small town and country relief bodies are able to admit they have the situation entirely in hand.”
The solution it proposes is a communal relief colony, and its inception was one that was borne out of necessity the year previous:
“With the approach of last winter an emergency plan was instituted as purely an emergency measure for aiding a number of families and individuals in one of the rural communities in the upper part of California. The motive prompting this particular enterprise was to make some of one man's money, available for charitable work, go as far as possible - farther than the unfortunate people, as individuals, could make it extend, and perhaps farther than through any organised welfare agency. The project, which we shall call the Farm Rehabilitation Relief Plan, was not started with any idea of yielding a return to the sponsor. Nevertheless, it has produced interesting results.”
The text goes on to lay out how seventy-three people, “ranging from six months to eighty one years of age…representing sixteen families, five single men [and] a number of transients” were provided “nourishing food,” a rudimentary shelter for housing, and the opportunity to work.
While the report is quite thorough, pertinent details are left rather vague (as evidenced by the above paragraph). There is no mention of the project’s location, its organizing body, etc. Perhaps, given the communal nature of the colony, there was concern it would be perceived as “Un-American.”