Narrator: President Franklin D. Roosevelt put his wife's idea into action.

The federal government bought a farm 20 miles from Scotts Run, built new houses, and began selecting families for relocation to the new community of Arthurdale.

Applicants were asked if they got along with their neighbors, if they had ever used farm tools, and if they could tell a rooster from a hen.

Blacks and foreign-born Whites were excluded. "Colored people do not make much of an effort on their own," said one official, "and foreigners are even worse."

Families from Scotts Run began moving to Arthurdale in the summer of 1934.

Glenna Williams: "The day that it came real to us was when the truck came down to pick up our furniture and take us up on the hill. And we got up there, and there was this little white house. All around it was green grass. There were trees behind it, silhouetted against the most beautiful blue sky. Our lives changed completely overnight."

Narrator: A school and cooperative store opened as did factories, where workers made vacuum cleaners and furniture.

Reporters from across the country arrived to see Eleanor's experiment. "It got so a man couldn't set down to his sow belly and turnip greens," complained one resident, "without some stranger peeking in the window to ask fool questions."

Arthurdale was the first of nearly 200 New Deal resettlement projects, but its planned economy fizzled. Factory goods weren't profitable enough, food production less than what was needed.

Jerry Bruce Thomas: "Arthurdale didn't accomplish what it set out to accomplish. The efforts to bring in manufacturing to Arthurdale failed. What manufacturer wanted to go out to a remote location like Arthurdale? It didn't make economic sense. Moreover, the farmland at Arthurdale turned out not to be very good land. They had picked bad land. They did a lot of foolish things. Economically, it didn't work in the long term."

Narrator: Government support of Arthurdale dwindled, yet Eleanor Roosevelt returned every year and continued to declare the project a complete success.