William Macy Stanton: Architect of the Cumberland

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal launched the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Subsistence Homesteads Division to help bring economic relief to families and communities devastated by the Great Depression. With the creation of these new programs came a need for the infrastructure that could support them, and for this, the Roosevelt administration turned to William Macy Stanton.

Born to a Quaker family in Ohio in 1888, Stanton worked as an instructor of drawing and design at ...