Homesteads Tower Museum

By the early 1930s the Cumberland Plateau was among the poorest corners of Tennessee, its thin soil worn out and its coal and timber work drying up in the Depression. In 1934 the federal government launched a bold experiment here, buying up land to create the Cumberland Homesteads, one of several subsistence-homestead communities meant to lift struggling families out of poverty by settling them on small farms of their own.

Families were chosen from the region's unemployed and land-poor, and they earned their homesteads through their own labor, quarrying stone, cutting timber, and building the houses, barns, and community buildings by hand. Each family received a house on a plot large enough to grow much of their own food, along with the tools to work it, and in time they were able to buy their homesteads outright.

The community that grew up here was tight-knit and largely self-sufficient, with its own school, cooperative store, and workshops. While some New Deal homestead projects faltered, the Cumberland Homesteads endured, and many descendants of the original families still live on the plateau, keeping the memory of the effort alive.

At the heart of the community stands the tower, built in 1937 and 1938 to hold the water supply and to serve as an administrative building for the project. Standing well over a hundred feet tall, it was the tallest structure of its kind in the area and quickly became the symbol of the whole undertaking, visible across the flat plateau farmland.

Like the homestead houses, the tower is faced in Crab Orchard stone, a warm, banded sandstone quarried on the plateau and prized for its color and durability. The same stone gives the district its unified, handcrafted look, and it went on to become a famous building material shipped far beyond Tennessee. The tower's battlemented top and rugged masonry make it feel far older than its Depression-era origins.

The tower now holds a museum devoted to the Cumberland Homesteads and the families who built them. Its exhibits draw heavily on the community's own people, with photographs, tools, household goods, and personal stories that trace daily life on a homestead through the hard years of the Depression and after.

Because so much of the collection comes from the descendants of the original homesteaders, the museum has an intimate, firsthand quality. Visitors climb the tower to reach the top and take in the view over the surrounding farms, many of them still on their original homestead plots, which makes the history feel close at hand rather than shut behind glass.

The tower is the anchor of the Cumberland Homesteads Historic District, and the real reward is to drive or wander the surrounding roads, where dozens of the original stone homestead houses still stand, many still lived in. Their steep roofs, stone chimneys, and matching Crab Orchard walls give the whole area a distinctive, unified character rare in rural America.

The setting is the high, open Cumberland Plateau, a landscape of farm fields, woodlots, and lakes with a cool, breezy climate in summer. Nearby state parks and the town of Crossville round out a visit, and the homesteads make a thoughtful stop for anyone interested in how the country tried to rebuild ordinary lives during its hardest years.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.