Historic Sites Sites

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp NHP-2 was created at Yorktown VA for the purpose of developing the Colonial National Historical Park (Jamestown Settlement, Yorktown Battlefield, Colonial Parkway). Camp NHP-2 housed CCC Company 323, which had been formed in Fort Washington, Maryland, in Spring 1933, before moving to Virginia. Company 323, along with four other African American CCC companies, developed Colonial National Historical Park. This work would continue until at least the end of 1941 – essentially, the entire life of the CCC program. The CCC enrollees worked under the direction of the National Park Service (NPS), which had just taken over the job of...

Colonial National Historical Park (CNHP) was created by Congress and President Herbert Hoover in 1930 and consists primarily of the Yorktown Battlefield, the historic Jamestown Settlement, and Colonial Parkway. Several federal agencies participated in its development. The National Park Service (NPS) provided general supervision of the entire historic site project after it was given responsibility for all historic battlefields by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Public Works Administration (PWA) contributed at least $600,000 (and probably much more) in funding. Relief agencies provided labor power: the Civil Works Administration (CWA) worked over the winter of 1933-1934 (probably for mosquito control and general...

Colonial National Historical Park (CNHP) was created by Congress and President Herbert Hoover in 1930 and consists primarily of the Yorktown Battlefield, the historic Jamestown Settlement, and Colonial Parkway. Several federal agencies participated in its development. The National Park Service (NPS) provided general supervision of the entire historic site project after it was given responsibility for all historic battlefields by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Public Works Administration (PWA) contributed at least $600,000 (and probably much more) in funding. Relief agencies provided labor power: the Civil Works Administration (CWA) worked over the winter of 1933-1934 (probably for mosquito control and general...

Colonial National Historical Park (CNHP) was created by Congress and President Herbert Hoover in 1930 and consists primarily of the Yorktown Battlefield, the historic Jamestown Settlement, and Colonial Parkway. Several federal agencies participated in its development. The National Park Service (NPS) provided general supervision of the entire historic site project after it was given responsibility for all historic battlefields by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Public Works Administration (PWA) contributed at least $600,000 (and probably much more) in funding. Relief agencies provided labor power: the Civil Works Administration (CWA) worked over the winter of 1933-1934 (probably for mosquito control and general...

Colonial National Historical Park (CNHP) was created by Congress and President Herbert Hoover in 1930 and consists primarily of the Yorktown Battlefield, the historic Jamestown Settlement, and Colonial Parkway. Several federal agencies participated in its development. The National Park Service (NPS) provided general supervision of the entire historic site project after it was given responsibility for all historic battlefields by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Public Works Administration (PWA) contributed at least $600,000 (and probably much more) in funding. Relief agencies provided labor power: the Civil Works Administration (CWA) worked over the winter of 1933-1934 (probably for mosquito control and general...

Monument The writers of the first Indiana State Constitution are said to have worked in the shade of a large elm tree because of the hot weather in June 1816. The Constitution Elm is a five-minute walk from the original state capitol building in Corydon that was the official site of the convention. Dutch Elm Disease killed the tree in 1925 but the stump was preserved with creosote. In 1937, the Works Progress Administration built a shelter for the stump using local sandstone cut by Civilian Conservation Corps laborers. The history of the site is commemorated with a bronze tablet provided...

The Eleanor Roosevelt Library is a room in the Whittemore House and Museum on 1526 New Hampshire Avenue, NW.  The house is the headquarters of the Woman’s National Democratic Club, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. According to the DC Preservation League, the house’s “distinguished guests have included Eleanor Roosevelt, who delivered many of her radio addresses in the 1960s from the house’s library and hosted a women-only press conference in the house to combat the obstacles faced by female journalists.” The house was built between 1892 and 1894 but it is unknown to the Living New Deal...

Federal Project Number One (1935-1939) consisted of the WPA’s art, music, theatre, writing, and historic records survey programs. It was headquartered in the McLean Mansion at 1500 I Street NW. The mansion was torn down in 1939 to make way for the new Lafayette Building (which still exists today, and is home to the Export-Import Bank). Federal Project Number One also ceased to exist in 1939, although New Deal art projects (except for the theater) continued on as locally sponsored (but still WPA-funded) projects throughout the nation.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) constructed replica barracks and other buildings at the Fort Abercrombie historic site. The buildings are still in use, but have been modified. According to State Historical Society of North Dakota, "After the fort was abandoned in 1877, fort buildings were sold and removed from the site. A Works Progress Administration (WPA) project in 1939-1940 reconstructed three blockhouses and the stockade and returned the original military guardhouse to the site. Major portions of the WPA project have been refurbished and the site reinterpreted."

President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, and the nation’s first female cabinet member, Frances Perkins, lived in this house from 1937 to 1940.  Today, it is a National Historic Landmark.

From 1913 to 1917, while FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the Roosevelts lived at 1733 N Street, NW.  They rented this home from Anna Roosevelt Cowles, or “Auntie Bye,” who was Teddy Roosevelt’s sister. It appears the house is no longer extant.

From 1917 to 1920, while FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the Roosevelts lived at 2131 R Street NW. Today, there is a plaque by the front door that acknowledges the Roosevelts period of residence here.

In 1965, a small cenotaph memorial to President Franklin Roosevelt was placed in front of the National Archives, at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 9th Street, NW.  It is made of marble and from the same rock quarry that was used for the president’s grave at Hyde Park, New York. According to a blog of the National Archives, FDR had wanted any memorial in his honor to be simple, telling Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: “If any memorial is erected to me, I know exactly what I should like it to be. I should like it to consist of a...

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Memorial in Washington DC was completed in 1997 at cost of $48 million dollars, funded largely by the federal government. It is located in West Potomac Park, along the tidal basin between the Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson memorials.  The memorial is managed by the National Park Service. The FDR Memorial is divided into four sections, with each section representing one of FDR’s four terms in the White House. The Cultural Landscape Foundation describes it: “The memorial’s rooms and water features, built primarily of red South Dakota granite, use stone to express the fracture and upheaval of the...

WPA Administrator, Secretary of Commerce, and aide to the president Harry Hopkins lived in this Georgetown house from about 1943 to 1946. A plaque on the building reads, “Harry Hopkins House, 3340 N Street, N.W., c. 1830, Foundation for Preservation of Historic Georgetown, Easement Acquired 2005.”

The Lafayette Building was the home of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), an important funding agency created by Herbert Hoover in 1932 and then greatly expanded by Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal years.  The RFC held an important financial role in America all the way through World War II The Lafayette Building was built in 1939-1940 with private funding, through a newly-created Lafayette Building Corporation (LBC). However, the RFC “was directly involved in planning the building that would be their headquarters… The RFC Mortgage Company purchased the Lafayette Building Corporation's outstanding stock on April 16, 1941, and a month...

The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building is named after Marriner Stoddard Eccles (1890-1977), FDR’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934-1948. It was built from 1935-1937, at a cost of $3,484,000. The Federal Reserve paid for the building out of its own funds, and also took part in the construction plans. The architect of the Federal Reserve Building was Paul P. Cret, and the contractor was the George A. Fuller Company. FDR dedicated the building on October 20, 1937, and Congress named the building after Eccles in 1982.

Mary McLeod Bethune was a major figure in the New Deal and one of the highest placed African Americans in American government up to that time. She served as director of the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs and was part of President Roosevelt’s informal advisory group, the “Black Cabinet.”  In 1935, she founded the National Council of Negro Women, a non-profit organization that still operates today (see the Living New Deal’s full biography, “Mary McLeod Bethune (1873-1955)”).  Bethune passed away in 1955. The Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial was created by Boston artist Robert Berks. It was paid for with...

The Moore Home was the home of Abraham Lincoln's stepsister. Lincoln saw his stepmother Sarah Bush Lincoln here for the last time January 31, 1861. The Civilian Conservation Corps dismantled the dilapidated structure and reconstructed it using as much of the original materials as possible.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) completed improvements at the San Jose de los Jemez Mission in Jemez Springs NM. The San Jose de los Jemez Mission is a mission compound for the Jemez Pueblo, established by the Catholic Church and the Spanish, rebuilt in 1621-1626. The initial excavation of the San Jose de los Jemez mission church began in 1921 and 1922, then advanced by the CCC in the late 1930s. The mission church and surrounding excavated structures are are part of the Jemez pueblo.

The United States Travel Bureau existed from 1937 to 1943 as an office within the Interior Department, and its mission was to promote travel in the western hemisphere and especially within the United States. The U.S. Travel Bureau had offices in Washington, DC, New York, and San Francisco. In DC, its office was located at 1702 F Street NW (at the corner of F and 17th), across from today’s Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The building that the Travel Bureau was located in is probably no longer extant. In their WPA Guide to Washington, DC, federal writers described the Travel Bureau’s office: “Its...

The Walker-Johnson Building contained the headquarters of several New Deal work-relief agencies, including the WPA. It was in this building that Harry Hopkins had his main office and where he directed the activities of federal programs that employed millions of Americans on public works projects across the nation. The Walker-Johnson Building was also utilized by the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency. The Walker-Johnson Building was demolished sometime after 1956, and the United Unions Building now stands at the site.

The WPA sewing room project at the Metropolitan Methodist Church in Washington, DC was located at the southwest corner of C Street NW and John Marshall Place (John Marshall Place no longer seems to exist, but most likely ran north to south on the western side of today’s John Marshall Park). Reporting on Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to the sewing room on July 6, 1936, the Evening Star noted that “1,300 women are employed in two shifts on making garments which are later distributed among W.P.A. relief clients.” Between 1935 and 1943, WPA sewing room workers in Washington, DC made over 1,350,000 items...

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees made many improvements at Yosemite Village and Curry Village at the east end of Yosemite Valley, in the heart of Yosemite National Park. At the time, these were known as the Old Village, New Village and Camp Curry. At Yosemite Village, the CCC teams installed log curbing, laid out new paths, and planted ferns, trees, and shrubs around the administration building, new hospital, residences, and Yosemite Museum. Some of the landscaping was done with native plants transplanted from various places outside the valley.  CCCers placed flagstones around the telescopes in front of the museum. Under the direction of...