During the Great Depression, Decatur and other small towns across the United States faced massive unemployment, bank closures, school closures, and the loss of farms and homes, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal helped boost the local economy in Wise County through projects that included scrap metal collection sites, sewing rooms for affordable clothing, soil conservation, library work, and street improvements. Work by Wise County residents through the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration created a more reliable county road system, which helped schools consolidate and made transportation easier. In July 1938, the county's first federally funded building, a new U.S. Post Office, opened in Decatur, and Ray Stanford Strong's oil on canvas painting Texas Plains, commissioned through the Public Works of Art project, was installed on its north wall in 1939. The building's basement housed the offices of the Farm Security Administration, County Agent, and Home Demonstration Offices. Between 1937 and 1940, three hundred thousand federal dollars from Roosevelt's New Deal provided Decatur with the Post Office, the 1939 WPA high school gymnasium and tennis courts, and extensive roadwork along South Trinity Street, leaving buildings and improvements that reflected the spirit and resiliency of Wise County residents during the twentieth century's most difficult financial decade.