Skyline, AL

Skyline began as a New Deal farming experiment on Cumberland Mountain. In 1934, the federal government bought roughly 13,000 acres in Jackson County and laid out 181 farms, each between 40 and 60 acres, with homes, farm equipment, a school, commissary, warehouse, and shared services. The project first carried the name Cumberland Farms, then Skyline Farms. Cotton and potatoes did not produce the hoped-for return, and the federal government began selling the project's holdings in 1944, but the settlement left a physical pattern that still shapes the town.

ATTRBrian Stansberry / CC BY 4.0

The project also produced a remarkable cultural footnote: the Skyline Farms Band played for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at a White House garden party in 1938. Today the Town of Skyline, incorporated in 1985, sits along State Highway 79 on the Cumberland Plateau. The old sandstone school remains on the Alabama Register of Historic Places, while homes and roads occupy part of the former farm layout. Skyline's current address is a modern municipality with a New Deal skeleton underneath it, tied to Jackson County schools, highways, and plateau communities.