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An Unemployed Worker’s Home, Morgantown, West Virginia

Walker Evans

1935

In 1935, Walker Evans spent two months in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, taking photographs for the Resettlement Administration (RA), a newly established federal government agency that relocated “destitute or low-income families from rural and urban areas” to planned communities, where they received public housing and other assistance. The coal miner who once lived in this house was probably relocated to Arthurdale, West Virginia, the earliest of these planned communities, which became a pet project of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1936, the community of Palmerdale—north of Birmingham in Pinson, Alabama—was declared one of the RA’s homestead projects. That same year, the Birmingham Age-Herald described the community, writing:


The homesteads, nearing 100, lie in the valley and, in some cases, on the lower slopes of the hills. The soil seems rich. The houses, while naturally more or less similar, are attractive. To some the sight and the whole idea may be somewhat suggestive of regimentation and standardization. But doubtless to the many families already living in Palmerdale, it is a great escape into what is at least a great freedom compared to the regimentation that adversity had enforced upon them.

  • Titles An Unemployed Worker's Home, Morgantown, West Virginia (Proper)
  • Artist Walker Evans, American, 1903 - 1975
  • Medium gelatin silver print
  • Credit Line Collection of the Art Fund, Inc. at the Birmingham Museum of Art; Bequest of Rena Hill Selfe, AFI.18.1996, image Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF342-889A
  • Work Type photograph
  • Classification Photographs