New Home for Christmas, Wake County, 1938

A "rehabilitation"  client who received a government loan mixes cement for his new home somewhere in Wake County, December, 1938. The state was rehabilitating land, not people. Rehabilitation clients were forced off land that the government felt needed to be taken out of production, usually because of severe erosion or flooding problems, and were given loans to start over in another site. This photo was taken by a WPA photographer as a publicity shot for the program, and it is part of the photographic collection of the Library of Congress.