Norvelt Honor Roll - Norvelt, Pennsylvania - Korean War Memorials on Waymarking.com

Norvelt is a census-designated place in Mount Pleasant Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, United States. The town 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.

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.[3] 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.[2] 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.[2] 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.

Although the government opened its program to broad segments of the unemployed, the division was especially keen on it reaching bituminous coal miners. Geographically isolated and dominated by a single employer, the residents of most patch towns were especially vulnerable once employment evaporated. So the division designed the homestead program to give miners and their families an opportunity to become economically independent by working the land, which, in theory, would also free them from the boom/bust cycle of industrial capitalism. Once the division had identified its target populations, the federal government began buying large parcels of land for subdivision into individual homesteads for up to 300 families. Encouraging home ownership through a rent-to-own program, the program's administrators expected residents to grow or raise everything they needed to survive, but they also hoped that the new communities would lure local industries that would in turn provide jobs and needed income.

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The building is owned by the community's fire department and is their social hall, that was also the community hall.

List if there are any visiting hours: Daily: Sunrise-Sunset Entrance fees (if it applies): FREE Type of memorial: Plaque Website pertaining to the memorial: Not listed

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