Wasn't It Great?

Arthurdale was Eleanor Roosevelt's pet project in socialism, and she busied herself with the details -- how the houses would look, where the streets went, what sort of curtains should hang in the living rooms, where the school would be, what sort of Wall Street tycoons should be persuaded to open cooperative factories. She insisted on plumbing and electricity in every home. Hundreds of families applied. The questionnaire made sure you had the right style of ambition. It asked the men what sort of farm work they liked or disliked, and if they'd ever borrowed tools from neighbors or swapped labor for food, and what games they liked to play in their free time.

It was nicknamed "Eleanor's Little Village," as if it were her own collection of Department 56 porcelain houses. There was a community center, a blacksmith forge, a co-op store, an Esso service station.

Eventually, 165 homes were built. (To Eleanor's disappointment, the government decided to keep the town segregated for whites only, because the schools already were.) Seeing it now, you get the exact sort of Great Depression authenticity and spirit you might be looking for, the sense of making do. If you call ahead, you can find the exact sort of people, too -- people who saw it, lived it. Not a lot of people -- perhaps a few hundred a year -- visit Arthurdale's museum, in the refurbished administration building. Most of them come because of the Roosevelt connection.

Here are Joe and Mary Wolfe, in the Arthurdale gift shop, only too happy to show you around the buildings restored by the Arthurdale Heritage Society.

Both Joe and Mary were born here in the 1930s to original homesteaders. Her family, with 11 kids, lived on the Q Road. His family -- they had three kids -- lived on F Road. (Of the grown-ups who were the original homesteaders, only one is left, and she just celebrated her 95th birthday.)

On one of her many trips to Arthurdale, Eleanor Roosevelt visited Mary's family's house during World War II, when Mary was about 5, "and I remember my mother saying, 'You kids sit on that sofa and don't move, not a word,' " Mary, now 70, says.

Joe and Mary grew up here. She married and moved to Ohio and raised her kids. He married and moved to Maryland and raised a family. They met again decades later, at one of the town reunions. They married each other in 2004 and live nearby in Reedsville. There's a New Deal festival here every July. You should go. Anyone should go who loves old houses and stories about furniture-making and wants to know about the fruit cellars and the restored tractor in the garage bay behind the old Esso station. Anyone should go who loves the Great Depression.

Because there's nothing wrong with feeling fond of strife.

We're in a room of the old administration building, and Joe and Mary are pointing to people in each of the high school classes. "I would say there's at least 20 millionaires who grew up in Arthurdale," Mary ventures.

"I don't know about that," Joe says.

"Millionaire," Mary says, pointing toward one handsome young man in the class of '39, then others. "Millionaire, millionaire . . . Hmm. Who else," she says, scanning each tiny class of seniors. "Don't know where she is -- some of them we couldn't ever track down."

Across the way from the town's Center Hall, Arthurdale has restored one of its Wagner model two-story homes, with the same furnishings, icebox, coal furnace, kitchen stove. The government got out of Arthurdale's operations in the late 1940s, and the social experimenting was over.

Mary's class was the last to graduate from the high school, in 1956. Joe graduated a year earlier. When they tore down the school, someone threw the basketball team's 1955 regional trophy away, but the lunch lady found it, and it resurfaced five decades later. They polished it, put it in the museum. That's Arthurdale. Eleanor's perfect little Depression town.

What happens when something so horrible is so beautiful?

"It didn't work," Mary observes. (The experiment, she means. Overall. The subsistence farming worked, but the co-ops and factories never turned a profit. Everyone eventually went back to work in the mines, or off to war, then out to the world.)

It didn't work and yet somehow it does, as a reminder of how bad it got. Mary remembers being a happy little girl. She says what they always say, that generation: "We didn't know we were poor." The bad was somehow good. There's the undeniable urge to return, go back, survive. Come what may.

The afternoon light dims across the hills, and the loveliest sort of silence takes over. Later, in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Morgantown, snow begins to fall.