By DAN BARRY

ELEANOR, West Virginia - Early spring, in the Depression year of 1935. A dark-haired girl of 4 from coal-mine country rocks beside her mother and two sisters in a car moving through the rain-swept night. Soon they will join her father, who has been working on some distant government relief project.

When the car finally stops, the sleepy girl can see only a blur of mud and midnight. Not until morning does she take in this government project: a new American town, raised from a field by her father and other men with families caught in the stalled gears of a broken economy. The girl is told: You’re home now, Marlane.

Late fall, in the recession year of 2009. A dark-haired woman of 78 drives slowly through the town she has always called home. “This is an Eleanor house, and this is an Eleanor house,” Marlane Crockett Carr says, nodding toward oversize bungalows distinguished by the original pitched roofs. “And this, and this . . .”

This year’s economic fallout continues, bringing to mind an even harder time, when federal stimulus programs meant more than just bridge repairs ; when the government tried to energize the economy by building highways, schools - entire towns.

Over the years, these Depressionera “resettlement” communities have been praised as a sound response to poverty and criticized as communism-tinted social experiments. But in this hard time, a place like Eleanor, named after Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, reflects a government action that worked, and works. I

n the desperate year of 1934, word spread through West Virginia of a federal “subsistence homesteading” project. More than 1,000 families applied to live in this new town called Red House Farms . Just 150 were accepted, including the family of Robert Crockett, a military veteran with three children, who had lost his job loading coal cars.

Each home had a chicken coop, a garden and a most exotic amenity, indoor plumbing. The families paid a modest rent that could be applied to the purchase price. The government expected them to work, grow vegetables and engage in cultural pursuits, like joining the band. Their children were to stay in school and take cod liver oil to ward off rickets. Save for the cod liver oil, Marlane loved it .

The town called Red House Farms soon changed its name to Eleanor, after the tall, approachable first lady. During a visit, she gave a pack of Doublemint gum to a girl named Dymple Cockrell. “I thought I was the richest girl in town,” recalls Ms. Cockrell, now 83 . “I shared it, of course.”

The Depression seeped into World War II. Three soldiers from Eleanor were killed . After the war, the government got out of the homesteading business, and essentially sold Eleanor to a corporation of its elders for $250,000.

One day Marlane jokingly told a friend she was going to marry that handsome sailor down the street. Two years later she did, eloping with Sandy Carr in 1947, when he was 21 and she was 16. Her father cried and said, You’re finishing high school. She did this, too.

Marlane and Sandy, a high school teacher , had three children: Sandra, Michael and the baby, Rebekah, born with a heart defect. Rebekah died in Marlane’s arms at age 13. To honor her memory, Marlane returned to school and became a surgical technician. All the while, Eleanor was changing: sidewalks, street lights, even a small shopping center at the end of town.

Marlane Crockett Carr ends her drive through Eleanor. Its population is now 1,500, including nearly 20 original homesteaders like Marlane. Still, Marlane senses the history of Eleanor being worn away . At times she wonders whether homesteaders like her parents are still seen as welfare recipients.

But when she thinks of the struggles of Robert and Eva Crockett, both buried now in the cemetery, close to Rebekah, her eyes blur with tears. “They had come from nothing,” she says. “They were told by Eleanor Roosevelt that it would be wonderful - and it was.”

Dymple Cockrell, left, and her sister in their hometown, founded 74 years ago.