Penn-Craft Historic District

Penn-Craft is a homestead community in the rural hills of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, laid out on 200 acres of farmland ten miles northwest of Uniontown. Between 1937 and 1943, the American Friends Service Committee and fifty families of unemployed coal miners built the community, which includes stone houses of local red sandstone, frame temporary houses, outhouses, brooders, a cooperative store and a factory. William Macy Stanton, a Quaker architect who had worked on the federal Cumberland Homesteads, prepared the layout and house designs, and project manager David Day devised movable wooden forms that let unskilled workers lay straight stone walls. Homesteaders built their own houses and earned labor credit for work on one another's homes. The district is regarded as an exceptional national example of 1930s back-to-the-land planning and the most complete example of its type in Pennsylvania. It was intended as a model that corrected problems found in federal subsistence homestead projects.