Government
The Real Town Behind This Year's Newbery Medal Winning Book
Dead End in Norvelt is based on a New Deal-era subsistence farming community in rural Pennsylvania.
A long time ago, in a political galaxy far, far away, the government of the United States decided that in order to help citizens struggling through the economic downturn of a lifetime, it would finance houses on plots of arable land where those people could live and get their feet back under them.
Part of the New Deal, this was called the “subsistence homesteads” program, and it ultimately created some 100 communities around the country, founded on an idealistic vision of “back to the land” self-sufficiency, where people would devote only part of their labor to getting cash and would fulfill the rest of their needs through barter or farming.