Norvelt, PA

Norvelt began as Westmoreland Homesteads, a 1934 New Deal project for laid-off bituminous coal miners and their families. Federal planners laid out 254 Cape Cod homes on large lots in Mount Pleasant Township, with a cooperative farm, schoolhouse, playground, post office, reservoir, and later a garment factory. Eleanor Roosevelt visited on May 21, 1937, and the community took the name Norvelt from the last syllables of her first and last names. The curving streets and small houses still reveal the plan. Norvelt is not a coal patch in the usual sense; it is a federal experiment that put home ownership, gardens, and shared facilities on the same Westmoreland hillside.