ARTHURDALE, West Virginia — The road into this quiet Preston County community gives little warning that it was once the setting for one of the New Deal’s most ambitious, and most debated, experiments.

Ninety-three years ago, Arthurdale became the first experimental community established under the federal subsistence-homesteads program, an effort to help impoverished families move from unstable industrial areas into planned rural communities. The idea was that residents could combine wage work with gardens, livestock, and small-scale home production.