The plan was ambitious enough to sound naive. Take families displaced by mine closures, failed farms, and shuttered factories. Settle them in a planned community where each household received a modest Colonial Revival house, a garden, and access to a community farm, woodworking shop, and weaving shop. The Civilian Conservation Corps did the heavy infrastructure - water systems, drainage, culverts - while skilled workers raised the houses in two basic styles: side-gabled A-frames and gambrel-roofed barn houses. The first dwellings went up in 1934. By the end of the decade, the homesteads had a community center (1937), a school (1939), a gas station (1940), and the East Dailey Bridge (1938). It was not a town that grew. It was a town that arrived.

Tygart Valley was one of three New Deal resettlement communities in the state. Arthurdale, the most famous, became Eleanor Roosevelt's personal cause, drawing reporters and critics from Washington. Eleanor, downstate near the Kanawha, took its name from the First Lady herself. Tygart Valley got less press but more buildings. The idea behind all three was the same: that families given decent housing, a little land, and access to cooperative enterprises could rebuild dignity and economic independence at the same time. Critics called it socialism. Supporters called it survival. The houses, modest as they were, gave hundreds of West Virginia families something the Depression had taken away - a place that was theirs.

Life in the homesteads ran on a particular rhythm. Mornings might find a homesteader at the Community Farm tending shared crops, or at the Woodworking Shop turning out furniture for sale beyond the valley. The Weaving Shop, one of the earliest buildings here, produced textiles that were marketed under cooperative labels. The idea was that residents would supplement subsistence farming with light industry and craft work, building a hybrid economy more resilient than either pure agriculture or pure wage labor. It did not entirely work as planned. The cooperative enterprises struggled, and many residents eventually took outside jobs. But for a time, the valley pulsed with the kind of structured experimentation that defined the New Deal at its most hopeful.

Drive through the district today and the architecture announces itself. The A-frames and barn houses sit on generous lots, their Colonial Revival details - simple trim, modest proportions, painted clapboards - distinctly of their era. The Dailey Community Center still stands. So does the school. The Warehouse and Woodworking Shop from the mid-1930s remain, weathered but recognizable. In 2004, the National Register of Historic Places added the district to its rolls, formally acknowledging what residents had always known: this was not just a collection of old houses but a coherent piece of American history, built fast and built to last. The cooperatives are gone. The community is not.