Macon’s Emergency Relief Administration-financed community house was constructed in the Craftsman bungalow style, and is currently used as the American Legion Hut, Post 63 for Noxubee County (Mississippi Department of Archives & History, Historic Resources Inventory; Barrow, 2001, NRHP nomination form). The building rests on brick piers, and the front entry has square wood columns on brick piers. A small porch is at the end of one gable, supported with square columns. The building retains a fieldstone chimney.
The Federal Emergency Relief Administration operated from 1933-1936 (John P. Deeben, 2012, National Archives) and was the first of President Roosevelt’s major initiatives under the New Deal Administration. FERA also built the community house in Pontotoc.
Community houses served as meeting locations, and their construction, later funded by the Works Progress Administration which replaced FERA, provided employment to local unemployed workers. Many of these community houses remain standing–17 are known to survive in Mississippi (Gatlin, 2008, NRHP nomination form)–and range in styles from the Craftsman in Macon to Tudor Revival variants in Grenada, Pontotoc and Winona, and Rustic log buildings in other areas.
The slide show below shows stages of construction for Carson Community House (in Jeff Davis County), Philadelphia Community Center (in Neshoba County), and mid-way through the Oxford Community House (Lafayette County). Those photographs were retrieved from the National Youth Administration Series 2018 Work Projects Photograph Album, 1937-1939, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. After you view the slide show, check out the original source and see more of work done by the NYA in Mississippi, many of which remain in use today.
Categories: Historic Preservation, Macon, New Deal
Preservation in Mississippi 
It’s a great old building and the Noxubee County Historical Society also uses it for meetings. It’s in pretty good shape on the inside too, all things considered.
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I did find some photographs of historic Macon that I thought might have been inside the building, in front of the fire place.
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It surely looks better today than in the picture – Macon Lion’s Club has purchased the building and uses it for their meetings, too. Fresh paint outside. Nice job! Martha
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Might want to checkout the mural of the signing of the 1820 Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty. It is located inside Macon’s U.S. Post Office on Main Street. I think it was commissioned under the FDR administration. I commissioned Mark Landis do me a forged copy of the wall mural. Of course he down sided the painting to “lap size.” .
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Yes, it was. Both the post office construction and the mural were New Deal Administration projects. The U. S. Post Office department worked with the U. S. Treasury and later the Public Buildings Administration to create news post office buildings and artworks. The murals were intended to be “art for the people” based on a concept by George Biddle. There were five arts and culture programs under the New Deal. The Treasury Section of the Fine Arts operated 1939-1943, which was the program that sponsored S. Douglass Crockwell’s painting “Signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1944.
You can read more about the building and the mural (and see photographs of both) at http://suzassippi.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-treaty-of-dancing-rabbit-creek.html
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