During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration dispensed federal funds to establish rural rehabilitation communities for farmers who had been displaced by the Depression to encourage the development of self-sustaining farm families.

One of the New Deal's most ambitious schemes for agricultural reform was the rural resettlement program. Four New Deal agencies-the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Resettlement Administration, and the Farm Security Administration-participated in the effort. Thereunder, the government was to purchase submarginal farmland nationwide and resettle its inhabitants on viable farms. In Utah, the resettlement agencies proposed to buy 5,280 submarginal farms and resettle 1,200 farm families. In practice, the agencies permanently resettled fewer than fifty of the state's farm families, centering their activities in Widtsoe, a small town twenty miles north of Bryce Canyon. None of the projects proposed within this collection were ever implemented by the resettlement agencies. Nonetheless, the papers in this collection are valuable, for they reveal much about the nature of the New Deal resettlement program and about environmental, social, and economic conditions in southeastern Utah during the Great Depression. It is fitting that these documents should be available at Utah State University since the university served as headquarters for the Resettlement Administration during the 1930s.