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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.