Beginning in the mid-1930s during the Great Depression, the federal New Deal promoted land resettlement to move farmers across the nation off worn out soil to new farmland. In west Macon County, the Resettlement Administration and its successor, the Farm Security Administration, established the all-African American experimental planned community of Prairie Farms on more than 3,100 acres from two plantations purchased by the federal government. The plan included 34 farms, a community pasture, a community center and school, a store, and a home site for the project manager. Prairie Farms included four local families and 30 families from the Tuskegee Planned Land Use Demonstration in east Macon County. Each farmstead had a new house with electricity, a drilled well and sanitary privy, a barn, stable, poultry house, vegetable house, and pig pen. Project manager Coleman Camp directed a diversified agricultural program based on livestock, especially hogs, vegetables, and hay, and away from dependence on cotton. In June 1937, the resettlement farmers organized the Prairie Farms Cooperative Association and operated a store, canning plant, feed and grist mill, hay baler, tractor and plows, mowing machine, and cane mill, giving farmers a way to buy equipment and supplies, market crops and livestock, and gin cotton cooperatively. The association also managed the community pasture and cattle herd. The Tuskegee Institute Prairie Farms Laboratory School, headed by Principal Deborah Cannon (Wolfe), served the surrounding community with a five-room building for grades 1-9, home economics facilities, a farm shop with tools, a health center equipped for examinations and treatment, a teachers’ cottage, a barn, and a playground. The school also served as a community center and a site for evening adult education and vocational classes. From 1944-1951, the U.S. Government sold all of the farm units to private owners.