Suburban DFW's Forgotten New Deal Colony, Part 1

The section of Arlington I went to grade school in is a crazy quilt of rapid urban development. The shining new tract of townhomes that we moved into in the late 1970s jostled with looming mysterious pecan orchards, lonely cowfields, straight broad new avenues, and a sprawling (and miraculously still thriving) sprocket factory.

Just a quarter mile down the road stands the portmanteau-cursed enclave of Dalworthington Gardens. In that suburb inside a suburb, one could easily think it was a town planned wholly by non-medicated schizophrenics. Old wooden shotgun homes stand on long rectangle plots thick with livestock rub right up against gated McMansions, checkerboarded with scraggly patches of vestigial Cross-Timber woodlands. The only thing tying them together seemingly being the immensity and uniformity of the multi-acre lots and the shits not given to urban planning.

Except for those spare few minutes ruminating in the car as I pull out of Mom's driveway, my brain never dwells on this nowhere and everywhere town. Wholly by accident I stumbled on a couple years that there is—or more accurately was—a rhyme or reason to Dalworthington. And not only was I dead wrong about the lack of plan behind the town, but the Plan was one of the more interesting—if fleeting—experiments of the New Deal.

Let's back up to 1933.

Eliot Roosevelt, the son of the president, has married into a local Fort Worth clan. Touring the area with mom, Eleanor, they call on Carl Mosig, the Fort Worth bureau editor of the Dallas Morning News, at his 15-acre south Arlington homestead. Looking south from Arkansas Lane over the empty land, Eleanor sees an ideal site for one of five Public Works Administration planned “subsistence homesteads” to be located in Dust Bowl-bombed Texas “to provide for aiding the redistribution of the overbalance of population in industrial centers.” 

Curiously the subsistence homestead colonies are not aimed directly at struggling farmers but at the swelling groups of farmers and agricultural workers pushed of the land and into the cities. Proletarianized and flitting around the edges of full time industrial work, the colonies are supposed to supplement the life and income of this part-time reserve army of labor by working their own plots in literal garden towns.

A few short months later a local 21-person exploratory committee is appointed and picks out a nearby 600-acre cane-stubbled field area bounded by woods on the south. By early 1934 large WPA work crews clear all the woods and build 34 new houses arrayed around small farm plots. Workers erect a community house around a 34-acre park, the planned heart of the community.

Dalworthington Gardens is born. And despite it providing immediate economic relief to its carefully screened settled residents (all making under $200/month household income), its a hot, dusty, miserable treeless place at first. 

There are no paved roads, no fences to keep livestock in and out of fields. No electricity or gas and the water pipes are tainted from a bordering oilfield thanks to a crooked (later indicted) local contractor. The residents have to carry water by hand from a spring.

The families are paying for this misery too, being required to pony up 10% of the cost of their homesteads (albeit with generous loans with monthly payments capped at $25). Of the 52 families that move in in 1934, only 26 are left by 1935.  

Today's post is running overlong. Part Two tomorrow winds up the story through the late 1930s and 1940s. Also Part 2 gets us to the broader political punchline about the tensions between the New Deal's reforms from above and the roiling struggles from below in that period.