Lake Dick

 lake, farm, interesting place, historic district, New Deal Depression Relief Project [1933-1945]

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Historic former New Deal Resettlement Administration planned community listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as a historic district.

Built: 1936-1938
Architect: Farm Security Administration
Areas of significance: Agriculture
Area: 145 acres
Date added to NRHP: 7/3/1975
Other designations: U.S. Historic District

The community of Lake Dick was a project of the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program that relocated struggling urban and rural farming families to U.S. Government-owned planned communities. In this particular community, 80 simple four- to six-room houses on 4-acre lots were arranged around Lake Dick. There was also a cluster of community buildings located here, including social spaces, a general store and a school for the families' children. This Resettlement Administration project was unique from ones elsewhere in the country. In most other projects, families were each given a 40-acre farm plot for their house and farming operations, and were largely responsible for their own success or failure. In contrast, Lake Dick provided families with homes on smaller 4-acre lots, with all of the farmland of the community being tended to by all of the families. Members of the community were therefore participants in a farming cooperative, and all were equally responsible for the farming operations within the community. The Lake Dick Cooperative Association was dissolved in 1946, and today all but a couple of the original farmhouses and ancillary structures that made up the community of Lake Dick have been either dismantled or moved elsewhere. It should be noted that the NRHP listing of Lake Dick encompasses just 145 acres out of the original 3,669 acres that the community occupied; there was once a great deal of farmland within the boundaries of the community. Today, the lake itself is the most visible reminder of this unique New Deal project.