Penderlea Homestead - Fact Sheet and Timeline 

Penderlea Homestead Farms, the first of 152 homestead projects developed in 36 states and the Virgin Islands under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, was established in 1934. 

Location:  northwest Pender County – North Carolina. 

Purpose:  To provide penniless tenant farmers, bankrupt farm owners, and unemployed ex-farmers during the Great Depression a means to make a living and to provide self-sufficient rural communities while easing the burden of over-crowded cities.

 Objective: To establish a cooperative truck farm with a central marketing plant.

 Plan:  To build and recruit people to a community consisting of: family farms, a school (on a 23-acre campus) which included an auditorium, gymnasium, cafeteria, library, shop building, home economics building, and teacherage; a vegetable grading shed, potato storage house, cannery, grist and feed mills, general store, social building, furniture factory, a hosiery mill, church and other buildings.

 In the latter part of 1933, Hugh MacRae, prominent Wilmington realtor and agricultural experimenter, proposed to the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, U.S. Department of the Interior, that a homestead project be established in Pender County.  The Division sent experts to investigate the land for its suitability and they found the soil perfect for truck crops.

 In February 1934, MacRae sold 4,700 acres of cut-over woodland to the U.S. government at a cost of $6.50 per acre. MacRae named as first project manager.

 The first tenant chosen to live on Penderlea was J.S. “Sutt” Austin who came to the property in March 1934. 

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