What’s the story behind Hermantown’s little brick houses?

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HERMANTOWN, MINN. – Dozens of quaint houses in this city north of Duluth were built as a government experiment in back-to-the-land living.

It was called the Jackson Project. Its signature 1.5-story houses were built in the 1930s, all with the same simple lines, brick veneer siding and chimneys. One area resident described them as looking like the brick house from “The Three Little Pigs.”

Reader Stacey Burns of Minneapolis became curious about the Jackson Project after reading a Minnesota Star Tribune news article about a deadly Hermantown crash. In 2022, a single-engine airplane crashed into one of the houses on Arrowhead Road.

Burns asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-generated reporting project, about the history of these houses.

Set on roomy properties along some of Hermantown’s main roads, the houses were built by the federal government in response to the Great Depression. People could apply for a chance to move in as renters and eventually get the opportunity to buy them.

The project was part of a New Deal program supported by President Franklin Roosevelt to get struggling Americans out of overcrowded urban areas and into rural places where they might be able to sustain themselves.

The colony of 84 houses took the rural township of Herman, which then had just a few hundred residents, in a new direction. Hermantown incorporated in 1975 and is now a city of 10,000.

Nearly 90 years after the houses were built, the people who grew up in the Jackson Project credit it, in part, with creating the robust community they’ve remained tied to.

“It gave people a chance,” said Linda Bray, who lives in the Jackson Project house where she was born and is among the resident experts on the city’s history.

“That was a big deal,” added Delaine Carlson, whose in-laws were the first owners of the house hit by the airplane. She and her husband built a house on the back end of her in-laws' acreage, where she remains.

The two are part of a team that collects and shares information about Jackson Project history.

Locally, it was called the Jackson Project, named for the nearby Jackson school. But the federal government called it the Duluth Homesteads, and created similar subsistence homestead communities in Austin and Albert Lea, Minn., as well as in places like Meridian, Miss., Crossville, Tenn., and Eleanor, W.Va.

The idea was to build affordable houses set on enough land for residents to independently produce food and keep animals. The homes would be for people with marginal incomes who didn’t meet guidelines to collect welfare.

The Duluth Chamber of Commerce, along with the Duluth Missabe Railroad, successfully applied to be a part of the program in the early 1930s. Within six months, the federal government had finished surveying land for soil type and proximity to graded roads. They bought 400 acres north of the city from a private company.

They cleared the land of large rocks and built a main road. Architects drew up several plans, all with 1.5 stories, a corner porch, central stairway and exterior chimney. The number of upper level bedrooms varied.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt insisted the designs be beefed up to include indoor plumbing and electricity, according to news reports from the time.

“Good old Eleanor,” Bray said last week.

Construction on the Jackson Project houses began in 1936, and the project grew to include 1,220 acres. The first batch of 40 houses drew 350 applications from hopeful families. Qualifications included need, character, age, children, prospects for employment, physical condition and farming experience.

The government favored dock workers, mail carriers, railroad men and those employed by the steel plant, according to “The Jackson Project: Ties that Bind,” published in 2007.

Residents would rent the houses with an option to buy after two years. Because these were rural properties, owners would need a reliable car.

Delores Levander grew up in a nearby township on a 20-acre hobby farm. She remembers driving past the Jackson Project homes as a child. The brick houses, she said, reminded her of the setting of “The Three Little Pigs.”

She married a Jackson Project Kid, as they are still called. Bob Levander’s family was among the first to claim one of the houses.

Decades later, she points out that the Jackson Project houses had luxuries not seen on her family’s farm or in the surrounding rural area: indoor plumbing, running water and central heating.

“They had all the conveniences of a city,” Delores Levander said.

Members of the first chosen families — described as with “eyes alight” and “trying their best to conceal their excitement” by the Duluth News Tribune — gathered to draw numbers in March of 1937.

This determined the order in which each family could select the property that they would move to the next month. The houses were all similar; the locations, with an average property size of 10 acres, differed.

Mr. John Jessick, who lived in West Duluth, got first pick of the four-bedroom houses, according to a story in the Duluth Herald. He and his wife had four school-age children and he had a job at a packing firm in downtown Duluth at the time.

“I like the idea first rate,” he told a reporter.

The Sundstrom family was the first to move in, according to a Duluth News Tribune account. They were a family of six who had moved from what is now Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood to a new “snug little brick home,” according to the newspaper.

With three bedrooms and an open living space, it had an electric refrigerator, a combination wood and coal stove, automatic water and a fruit and vegetable cellar. It was insulated with aluminum foil.

Mrs. Sundstrom took a reporter on a tour of the new house. “Look at all this closet space,” the new homeowner said, according to the article.

By March 1938, all 84 houses had been built and filled. By the summer of 1939, residents had formed a cooperative homestead association and paid off the entire $225,742 debt to the U.S. government.

The first mayor of Hermantown, Helmer A. Ruth, lived in a Jackson Project house.

The city’s current mayor, Wayne Boucher, also lives in one, although his additions have more than doubled the size of the original 800-square-foot house. There are bragging rights to living in one of the historic houses, he said.

Mary Murphy, the longest-serving woman in the Minnesota House, spent her life in one. It’s referenced in her obituary: She loved tending to the home and the 5-acre yard and garden, “followed by a refreshing root beer on the porch with her favorite nephew Gregg.”

More than a handful of Jackson Project Kids, whose parents were the first to live in these houses, have retained the family’s land. The Jackson Project house that Bray lives in was secured by her parents in the second round of offerings.

Bray describes a tight-knit community that feels like family. When she was born, her mother selected friends from the neighborhood as godparents.

“We all share that history,” said Bray.

Roger Johnson still lives on the family’s property on West Arrowhead Road, where his parents moved from West Duluth in 1937. His dad worked on the ore docks, his mom at Woolworth. The family of five shared a three-bedroom house with gardens and livestock.

“Well, it was really nice,” Johnson recalled. “We had plenty of room here to do whatever we wanted.”

When a plane crashed into one of the houses in 2022, all three on board the aircraft were killed. The “high-energy impact“ also destroyed the house, and what remained of it was later torn down.

It’s one of only two Jackson Project houses that are no longer standing, although many have been renovated and expanded. The other was sold to the Hermantown School District and demolished because it was too expensive to move, according to Bray.

The plane crash sparked renewed interest in Hermantown’s signature houses — and not just from Burns, the Curious Minnesota reader.

The University of Minnesota Duluth’s University for Seniors program added a class about the colony’s history. The instructors include Bray and Carlson.

On a recent afternoon, they gathered at the Hermantown History Center to work on their presentations.

They worked a few feet away from a small brick replica of a Jackson Project house, with period-specific light fixtures, a hardwood kitchen table, icebox and stove. A spittoon sat in the corner near a sturdy chair.

They had slides, a script, maps and vintage photographs. There is always a new question about this unique chapter of Minnesota history to find answers to, they said.

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