Forum: Website invites ‘crowd’ to add to New Deal’s living history

The website is cataloging the art, architecture and parks built across the country during the New Deal era.

By Ann Morgan / Herald Forum

If you’re interest in local history or want to add your own family history into the record, then you’ll want check out a website, which has a “crowd-sourcing’ element”: Living New Deal, livingnewdeal.org/.

As you might know, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president during the Great Depression, he and Congress moved swiftly to address the problems of a large number unemployed and homelessness citizens through congressional action. Those bills were called The New Deal and funded all kinds of projects across the nation and here between 1933 and 1942.

Today, we would call these infrastructure projects. Examples includg the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which established rural work camps that developed our National Parks and state parks and employed millions of young people in conservation work. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) funded and built major construction projects for roads, municipal buildings, bridges, airfields, employed cultural workers and more. The work was designed to serve civic purposes across the nation.

Many of these projects still exist in Everett and across the Puget Sound region. Here, they built the existing Everett Public Library in downtown Everett, helped to establish our city sewer system, public water system and contributed to the development of Paine Field. The Living New Deal website hosts historiess, photos, maps and more regarding these, and an growing list of projects, along with available photos.

As an example of what can be found on the website, one entry with photos, tells of a 9- by 20-foot mural, “Paul Bunyan at the Stillaguamish,” that was painted by Richard Correll at Arlington High School, then at 135 S. French Ave.

Historians are now working to establish online documentation of projects that were completed from the New Deal legislation on the website. The website provides searchable maps, photos and documentation.

Some of the New Deal’s projects are now gone, but if you or a relative knows of a project not on the website, you can send information to the researchers listed on the website. They will work to confirm the existence of the project, and find photos —or you can submit your own — which can add to this history.

It’s a great opportunity to crowd-source our history and record our own local and family histories, documenting a decade of tumultuous change. In some ways, so similar to our own.

Ann Morgan lives in Everett.

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