- [Narrator] The Citizenship Project is brought to you in part by a grant from the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Narrator] The story of Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau is as rugged as its landscape.

- When you have somebody who is able to be that ruthless, it tends to accelerate the levels of violence and retaliation in the region around it.

This is nasty stuff.

It's, you know, war at every door.

- [Narrator] From the ravages of Civil War to the desperation of total economic collapse.

Families on the plateau were forced to endure more than most.

- Everybody around here was basically, out of work.

There were no jobs, there was no money there.

It was hard times.

- [Narrator] We'll explore events that turned citizens of the plateau against the government in the 1860s, and focus on a new deal era project that restored faith in the American dream for many during the darkest days of the Great Depression.

- The New Deal was the first time that the United States government had concerned itself with the daily affairs of its people, and there was a lot of resistance to that.

(gentle music) (guns blasting) (soldiers screaming) - We often forget just how divisive the Civil War was in Tennessee.

Now, a lot of us know that East Tennessee supported the Union cause for the most part, and that Middle Tennessee, for the most part, supported the Confederacy.

Well, of course, that means the Cumberland Plateau is right between the two of them.

- The topography of the Cumberland Plateau is really important to understand to get at why some people went one direction and not the other.

The east side of the plateau is this Long Ridge, Walden Ridge, and then it drops down into the Tennessee Valley.

And then in the South you have this Sequatche Valley that's sort of cut in the middle, but each of these places, it's almost like a micro political climate.

But the west side of it is where it's really most unpredictable, because the erosion just sort of creates these hollows, these caves, these basically hideouts.

And so for those who had an intimate knowledge of this area, they were gonna be able to take advantage of it.

But for large-scale troop movements, it's very difficult to navigate it.

What it also means though is that who you were connected to before the war mattered enormously.

So, if you had a financial tie with somebody west towards Nashville, chances are that was gonna pull you in a Confederate direction.

If you were a mile away from there and had none of those ties, there's a better chance you would've been pro-Union.

It's those who have either railroad, or river, or some other ties to the wider south, those are the folks who tended to be more pro-Confederate.

- So, you can imagine those who stayed behind on their farms and in their towns, well, of course, they were partisans.

They supported the side that their fathers and sons fought on.

So, imagine how bitter that could become.

And in fact, out of this region comes two of the most famous partisan fighters, Champ Ferguson for the Confederacy, and Tinker Dave Beatty for the Union side.

- [Aaron] Champ Ferguson is a really intriguing character, because he comes from a part of southern Kentucky, Clinton County, Kentucky, that was very pro-Union, although it was a very divided region.

His family was all pro-Union, and yet, he was the only Confederate supporter among his family, and really one of the few among his region.

He was driven through personal circumstances, the personal events that had happened to him, really starting a couple years before the Civil War that drove him onto the Confederate side.

And then things really escalated from there.

There was a point in 1858 where some men from Fentress County, Tennessee had apparently ripped him off with a deal over some hogs.

And Ferguson was rightly angry about this.

And so, he and some friends of his had gone over the state line and chased down these people who had defrauded him.

And he went and attacked and killed at least one of them, then fled back to Kentucky.

He was then indicted for murder.

And his attorney, Scott Bledsoe, was a Confederate supporter.

And so at some point, Ferguson got the notion in his mind that if the Confederacy wins the war and he goes with Bledsoe's unit, then somehow the indictment will be dropped against him.

He was very much driven by these personal circumstances, but once that got the ball rolling, he started getting harassed for that reason, including being arrested at one point.

And was able to get away basically, and eventually, moved out of that area down to near Sparta, Tennessee.

And that became sort of his home base for much of the rest of the war.

But then he developed this mentality that anybody who was pro-Union was out to get him.

And so, he was gonna attack people before they could get him.

And you know, if he saw you, you probably were not gonna get away alive.

Developed this extremely fierce reputation within about a year into the war.

And of course, that really accelerated what was already a nasty guerilla war inside of the Civil War.

When you have a complete breakdown, you have this vacuum of authority.

And so, there's an opportunity for whether people are just simply sadistic, or just want money, or just want to get personal revenge on people.

And so, they were drawn to his unit, because they were so fearsome.

- [Narrator] Samuel Champ Ferguson's reign of terror would continue throughout the war.

Once Union victory was secured, Ferguson was apprehended and tried before a military commission in Nashville on 53 counts of murder, which led to further resentment against the Union by Confederate sympathizers on the plateau.

- What really hurt the cause of the US government in the region was when the war was over, the federal government decided to prosecute one of those guerrillas, and of course, it was Champ Ferguson.

Tinker Day Beatty goes off and lives a long life and he's not touched, but Champ Ferguson is tried in Nashville and then executed.

One of the few Confederates executed after the war for their activities during the war.

Well, that created such a level of mistrust towards the federal government it lasted generations among those who supported the Confederacy.

So again, where you have a region that's equally divided, that means those divisions and lack of trust it didn't go away.

It stayed within the populace and stayed within families.

In the post-war period, in the Cumberland Plateau, the federal government's presence sort of disappeared, Outside of the Postal Service, the federal government didn't have a presence there.

And I really think for the people in the region that meant citizenship was up for grabs.

What did it mean to be an American in a region where the federal government had no presence?

And in fact, what was really changing their lives was the arrival of the railroads, coal companies, and timber companies controlled by outside firms, maybe hundreds of miles away, and, you know, really had no concern for the people there.

They had great concern for the resources.

So, suddenly they were on an island in a region that does need resources and does need help, and that help wasn't there.

So, what did it mean to be a citizen in the Cumberland Plateau?

Well, it really meant a local presence, a local feeling.

You didn't probably feel like you were part of the United States, because as far as you were concerned, that was so far away it was meaningless.

(somber music) - You have these new industries that come in and that provides an engine of some opportunity, some economic growth, but there's a whole up and down that comes after the Civil War with the rise of timber and coal and then the fall of it.

And again, that's not a Civil War thing, it's another generation later of industrial, labor-based conflict.

And then it eventually, you know, collapses as that the coal runs out, basically.

But there's a lot of up and down in that region.

But by the time you get to the 1910s and the twenties, that industry is starting to peter out.

After World War I, basically, as coal mining starts to decline a bit and timber starts to decline, they are facing a lot of economic trouble.

(somber music) (suspenseful music) - Everyone knows that in 1929 we had the stock market crash and ushered in the Great Depression.

Now, the story up here on the mountain was not the story of the stock market in 1929.

We didn't have anybody that had any stocks.

The disparity was awesome, different, bad, you know, the inequality in access to resources is staggering.

(suspenseful music) - Tennessee was already in a depressed economy long before the stock market crashed in 1929.

Farmers across the state were really having a very difficult time making ends meet.

As the price of the products went down, the price went down, because the farmers had borrowed more money to buy more land to produce more.

And so, Tennessee's agriculture was highly depressed before the stock market crashed when Herbert Hoover was president.

So, in comes Franklin Roosevelt, he is a very articulate speaker, he has a great radio voice, which was something that Herbert Hoover didn't have and he saw the potential of political advancement by using the radio.

And so, he comes in and he tells the American people that he wants to offer the country a new deal.

And so, that became the slogan throughout all of the programs that he began to introduce in Congress to pull the United States out of the Depression.

- Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.

In the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.

I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis, broad executive power, to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me, if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

(audience applauding) - [Narrator] President Roosevelt's New Deal was a series of financial reforms and public works programs designed to reverse the crushing economic depression, which gripped the nation.

One such program established the division of subsistence homesteads.

This agency set out to create experimental communities where destitute families could work for the chance to earn their own farm.

The plight of Tennesseans on the impoverished plateau prompted the decision to locate the largest of these communities near Crossville.

Cumberland Homesteads would become known as the showplace of the New Deal.

Despite the community's creation by the division of subsistence homesteads, FDR had much higher hopes than just survival for its inhabitants.

- President Roosevelt, FDR, over and over used the term, we do not wanna help these people merely survive.

We want them to thrive and to live the abundant life.

And also the first lady, Eleanor, she's the one who the record shows insisted that the houses built, 251 of them originally, that they would have running water and they would have be wired for electricity.

We didn't have electricity, we wouldn't get it for three more years, but we were ready for it, and we were wired for plumbing.

So she was very forward looking.

- [Narrator] The first lady visited the project repeatedly and even played a part in designing its iconic signature tower, which served as a water tower and administrative offices for the homesteads.

In her memoirs, she wrote of the overwhelmingly positive impact of the community and her admiration of the inner strength of Tennesseans, but that would do little to silence critics of the project.

- FDR faced a lot of opposition, much of it from his own party.

We had a of politicians, including some of them from our own state, who didn't want us to spend our resources on people like that.

You know, let 'em be a little bit hungry.

This is a socialist program or maybe even a communist program.

That was exactly what they said, and that's still a trick that they're using today in politics.

- The New Deal not only wanted to provide employment and opportunity for citizens, it really wanted to rebuild the nation's confidence in itself and redefine what it meant to be a US citizen.

That citizenship really would mean something and the government was in a partnership with you and your community and your state.

So, this rang true in the Cumberland Plateau through the Cumberland Homesteads Project, because not only did this provide homesteads to farm families, mining families, timber families who were desperate for new opportunity, it also gave them the chance to build their own capacity, because the program was never a handout program, it was a hand-up program.

Here we are, we're going to work with you to provide you with a house, out buildings, and you know, around 16 acres that you can grow food for yourself and produce whatever you wish to produce, but then we're going to surround the homesteads with new factories, because this is that great transition that's happening across the nation from a mostly rural agricultural economy to more of an urban industrial economy.

(somber music) This new relationship between the residents of the plateau and the federal government is really expressed through crab orchard stone.

If you don't know the buildings of the plateau, many of them are built with this beautiful multicolored sandstone.

And you think, where does this come from?

Well, it comes from the ground there.

And people had been mining it and using it for construction for several decades before the New Deal.

So ironically, when the New Deal designers came to Cumberland Homesteads, they saw this stone being used in local buildings and they embraced it.

- [Narrator] With the construction of the original 251 home sites underway, efforts began to select families from more than 2,000 applications to become members of the community.

10 caseworkers were given the task of screening families whose applications passed an initial review.

- The personnel man hired 10 people, they were all women, to go around to the places where the applicants lived and ask questions of the neighbors and pry into their affairs.

I know a little about that.

My mother was one of those 10.

(Charles chuckling) - They visited the homes of every homesteader that was gonna be doing anything here on the homestead.

And to make sure that they were personable people, that they were clean cut and all those things that you would look for.

- [Charles] They asked questions you couldn't ask anymore.

Your so and so neighbor has applied for this special program and we need to know if they get drunk on the Saturday night, stuff like that.

- I was born and raised on the homestead on 25 Sawmill Road, which is the road right past turned into the state park.

So, that's where we swam and where we recreated.

We had a dance floor and had a pretty good life going.

- Everything was about the community.

They said, "Hey, we need something for them to recreate in.

They're working very hard.

They need an area where they can go and have their days off and spend some time and just be with family."

And that's how Cumberland Mountain came to be.

- [Narrator] Located within the Homesteads Project, Cumberland Mountain State Park was created under the direction of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program, employing young men to build parks and improve public lands.

- [Mark] They had their barracks here and they would have somewhere around 200 young men that would come in and taught them a trade.

Our main draw for the park is the bridge.

So, it's the largest that was ever built by the CCC.

And the sandstone that it's encased in was all mined here outta Cumberland County.

It was all from that crab orchard stone.

Once you came down here to the beach area, you'd swim all day long or you'd have all kinds of little recreation going on for the families and the people.

- [Narrator] Recreation, though welcomed, was often a luxury as every family member contributed to the goal of home ownership.

Mothers and fathers worked to accumulate credit hours, which went toward the purchase of the homesteads, while children helped with farm and household chores.

- We worked hard, because we had to work hard to make things meet, and sometimes it was terribly hard to do that.

We all worked in the bean field, we worked in the strawberry patches.

I loved the strawberries, 'cause they were just as far as you could see, were red strawberries.

That's how we made our little bit of spending money was getting paid for getting of the greens and so forth out of the field.

And my grandfather had mules and had horses and we had all had work to do with keeping up with the farm.

We did take a lot of pride in being raised here.

And the people in Crossville, we knew for a fact called us the hillbillies, and there's several such names as that, which didn't hurt us at all, and we ignored it for the most part.

And we usually, beat them like son of a gun in football.

So, that also made us feel pretty good.

- The pride of residents in the Cumberland Homesteads experiment, is expressed throughout that landscape.

You can go to the Great Tower, the old water tower for the project, which is now a museum.

And you can see that in their exhibits, and in their tours, and everything they tell you.

You go into the homesteads themselves, they're well kept, you know, certainly they've had additions, because families change, but you know, they stay true to that core look of the homesteads.

You look across from the tower and there's their public schools built of the same stone.

You know, they took this opportunity created by the federal government and made it their own.

So, there's little doubt why they're so proud of their achievement and what they have done there, their legacy they've created, because they took an opportunity, made it their own, and turned it into a lasting contribution, not only to their county, but I always think the state.

The Cumberland Homesteads just make a powerful statement to us all that in the worst of times people given resources and opportunities can build new communities that stick with us for generations.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Some goals for the Cumberland Homesteads would never be realized.

Multiple attempts to attract industrial development would ultimately end in failure, but the experimental community would prevail.

And the vast majority of its crab orchard stone homes still stand to this day.

- That question was asked of one of our homesteaders, "Do you think this project was a success?"

He said, "Well, we came up here and we didn't own anything, but the shirt on our back.

We've now had five children that we sent through college.

Do you think it might have been a success?"

(Charles laughing) He put it a very personal level and I think the story over and over is a resounding success.

Now, there are people who use the term Utopia.

Now, if they're going to compare this to a Utopia, it's just not gonna happen.

But it wasn't designed to be a Utopia.

It was designed to be a living, thriving, growing community.

(gentle upbeat music) - I think that's always gonna be debatable, and historians have debated this since the 1940s.

Was the New Deal necessary or not?

I have just completed a study for the National Park Service about the impact of World War II on the US home front.

And certainly, you know, the spending that came during World War II just transformed so much of the country.

But boy, if you didn't have what the New Deal did before, the table would not have been set.

I'm not so sure the 1940s turned the way they did without that contribution.

They didn't transform everything, but they did change the lives of the people who lived in the plateau.

(gentle music) - The most striking feature of the whole program is that it was from day one clearly never a handout program.

It was a chance to have a job, and to work, and to pay for a little spread here and that was what it was.

It was never, it was never a handout.

It's a sobering thought to realize that the income disparity of America in 2024 is greater than it was at the time of the Great Depression.

So, if I leave you with a thought, it would be this.

Perhaps we learned some things in these projects that we could use today to make our lives better.

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] The Citizenship Project is brought to you in part by a grant from the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area.