| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Historic Preservation.
*site file in the large W.H. Hatten Recreation Park*
WPA project wall around whole park, also several stone park structures, bridges, gateposts.
Seeking to put Americans to work again during the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration in 1935 and appointed Harry Hopkins its first head. At the WPA’s inception, Hopkins explained the reasoning behind it: “Give a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and pay him an assured wage, and you save both the body and the spirit.” Over the course of its seven-year existence, the WPA employed more than eight million Americans--about one-fifth of the country’s entire work force. They built 2,500 hospitals, nearly 6,000 schools, 350 airports, 8,000 parks, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads. In the process, the workers rebuilt their own pride and restored their communities’ faith in the future.
Rural America was especially hard hit by the Depression, so the WPA undertook many projects to spruce up small towns and put their people back to work. New London’s Hatten Memorial Park was typical. Under WPA direction, and with the federal government footing a percentage of the bill, local residents built picnic shelters, restrooms, a lagoon with footbridges, gateways, a retaining wall, and other park features. But the most impressive facility they built was Hatten Memorial Stadium. This structure, though designed to accommodate local baseball games and other athletic events, looks more like a medieval fortress from the outside, with its random-coursed limestone walls and its four parapeted, round-arched entry portals behind the grandstand.
William Hatten, a wealthy lumber baron, donated $10,000 to the city for the stadium, on condition that it be named for him. |
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