It was called the Skyline Project, and its existence is so obscure that it does not even have a Wikipedia entry.

I first became acquainted with it growing up in northeast Alabama, and though the community I grew up in was extraordinarily rural, it paled in comparison to the severe remoteness of Skyline, a tiny settlement that is little more than the remains of the government’s experiment.  One of the largest of 43 such experiments around the country, Skyline Farms was intended to offer an alternative to the relatively bleak outlook offered by tenant farming.  The idea was simple enough — give farmers land and resources and let them farm.  Eventually, they will prosper and at such time they will be able to buy their land free and clear from the government.  Unfortunately, not all went according to plan:

In the early 1940s, Skyline Farms fell on hard times as cotton crops failed because of the unsuitable land and climate in north Alabama. A switch to potatoes failed as well. The federal government constructed a hosiery mill in the community to boost the economy, but it too failed as a result of a war-time shortage of nylon. The communal factory at Skyline Farms and other project sites brought charges of socialism from some members of Congress as well. Internal factions developed among participants over the management of the project, and beginning in 1944 the federal government began to liquidate the project’s assets, selling to private buyers. Of the original farm families, only two were able to buy their farm units.

And so the grand experiment, benevolent though it may have been, collapsed and its members spread throughout the countryside, finding work where they could.  Little scholarship exists on the Skyline Project, save one article, and it isn’t really available.  I admit to being struck by the paucity of online resources and may end up writing the Wikipedia entry myself.

But Skyline was not the only such experiment undertaken in Alabama.  Its counterpart, in the opposite corner of the state, was called Gee’s Bend Farms Inc and was, in many respects, a mirror of Skyline Farms with one exception: the farmers were black.

Built primarily on the land once comprising the Pettway plantation, Gee’s Bend experienced a mercifully less disastrous fate than its counterpart and many farmers were able to buy their land and begin farming as freeholders, something few blacks in Alabama could claim at the time.  The community, if not necessarily thriving, is still extant and the products of its quilting culture are well known and highly regarded.

Born perhaps more of desperation than idealism, these projects are well worth remembering and their absence from the broader cultural memory of the South is a shame.  Though neither project can be called an outright success, Skyline and Gee’s Bend deserve more than footnote status in the history of the South.  After all, we are certainly not a people to forget our tragedies.