During the depression era there was something called WPA camps all over the USA. Many of the brick buildings you see around your towns were built during that era.

Anyway, my grandpa had rickets and was in poor health so couldn't work hard labor in the coal mines but he was sent to a WPA camp at Fort Knox in Kentucky so that his wife and kids could get food subsidies and whatever income the WPA camps paid.

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When he came home he brought with him buckets of bent nails that he picked up over the years he was there and he and his kids hammered them straight and that's what he used to build the house they lived in until the coal mines bought them out to strip mine the hill they lived on. The same nails that build Fort Knox built their home.