New Deal Accomplishment: Millions of acres and thousands of miles landscaped


Above: From the Emergency Work Relief Program of the FERA, April 1, 1934 - July 1, 1935.


Above: WPA workers landscaped Roger Williams Park in Providence, Rhode Island. Photo from the National Archives.

New Deal Landscaping Made America Beautiful

It's difficult, and perhaps even impossible to measure the exact amount of landscaping the various New Deal agencies performed because it was measured alternately in acreage and linear miles (and the latter cannot be transferred into the former), and sometimes measured with little precision at all. 

Nevertheless, by examining final reports of several New Deal agencies we can at least get a general idea of the scope and magnitude of the New Deal landscaping projects.

The Work Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration landscaped "over a million acres of public grounds" (see first photo above). The WPA landscaped 211,240 acres of land (not including parks and roads) and 58,209 miles of roadside areas. The CCC reported landscaping on 233,793 acres, but this number is probably based on a restrictive definition of landscaping, given the CCC's enormous volume of work in soil conservation and tree planting. Workers in the National Youth Administration landscaped and beautified 12,380 miles of roadside areas.

The Civil Works Administration (CWA, a forerunner to the WPA), engaged in a lot of landscaping too, but the total acreage or miles is difficult to ascertain. It must have been massive however, since the CWA employed over 4 million jobless Americans and since roadwork, parks, and general landscaping were part of the bread & butter of what they did (see, e.g., Analysis of Civil Works Programs Statistics (1939), pp. 10-11.

At the very least, we can confidently say that the New Deal landscaped millions of acres and thousands of miles of land. America was beautified by this common good.

"Landscaping is one of the most cost effective tools for improving and sustaining the quality of life, whether in the city, the suburbs, or the country."

--Diane Relf, "The Value of Landscaping," Virginia Cooperative Extension, September 23, 2022

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