County Exhibit Highlights the Great Depression in NJ

The newest exhibit to open at the Middlesex County Museum in Piscataway's Cornelius Low House will explore how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of his New Deal program, benefitted the Garden State and its workers.  

The Got Work? New Deal/WPA in New Jersey exhibit will kick off at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 14 with a reception inside Cornelius Low House, located at 1225 River Road. 

It's the first comprehensive look at the Great Depression in New Jersey, as told through images, photographs, posters, and artifacts that highlight social conditions in the 1930s.

Relief from the grinding poverty of the age came through dozens of federal programs that taught new skills and employed craftsmen who otherwise would've remained without work. All 7 rooms of the Cornelius Low House will be used in the exhibition, which will include kiosks with the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a Federal Writers' Project interview with an elderly man who had once been a slave.

Guest curators will be on hand to discuss this landmark project, and guests will receive a memento of the WPA Writers' Project.

Got Work? New Deal/WPA in New Jersey is offered without charge and will be open to the public  8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, and 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays (except holidays). The exhibit will be on display through June of next year. 

For more information please call the museum at 732-745-4177.

The program is being funded in part by the Middlesex County Board of Chosen Freeholders, Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission, and the New Jersey Historical Commission, a division of the Department of State.