On March 31, 1933, Congress passed a law authorizing the creation of 800 state parks, to be built by an army of young men that did not yet exist. The deadline was July 1: a quarter of a million enrollees were to be moved from city streets and worn-out farms into forest camps within three months. The program that emerged was the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Park Service’s own records show how close it came to failing. By May 10, five weeks in, the numbers were behind schedule.
A reorganization on May 12 gave officials more room to act, and the Army took over the task of mobilizing the recruits. The system that followed had three parts. The Labor Department selected young men through the U. S.
Employment Service. The Army gave them physicals, held them at posts for conditioning, clothed them in surplus uniforms, and shipped them by train to the camps. The departments that owned the land—the Forest Service, the Park Service, and state agencies—ran the actual work projects. The first enrollee signed up in the first week of April 1933.
Ten days later, around 200 young men arrived at Camp Roosevelt in the George Washington National Forest near Luray, Virginia, the first camp in the entire program. On paper it was National Forest Camp Number One. On the ground, it was a single camp of 200 men with 1,249 more camps yet to be opened, each needing a site, water, kitchens, beds, tools, officers, and trains. The rules for enrollment explained the urgency.
A young man had to be single, between 18 and 25, and out of work. He received $30 a month, but $25 of it was sent directly home to his family. Many enrollees remembered receiving only $5 while their mothers got the $25 check in the mail. Hundreds of thousands signed up within weeks, but finding the men was never the hard part.
Examining, clothing, feeding, and moving them into working camps by the deadline was. By the July 1 deadline, the count was in: more than a quarter of a million young men were at work in over 1,300 camps. Added to them were 28,000 war veterans and 14,000 Native Americans enrolled for work on reservations. The total passed 300,000, and it had been achieved just 92 days after the bill became law.
CCC Legacy calls it the most rapid peacetime mobilization in American history. The camps themselves were run with military discipline. Reveille came at 6:00 a. m.
, bunks were checked for hospital corners, and meals were plentiful. One Oregon enrollee remembered walking into the mess hall on his first day and seeing tables loaded with meat, potatoes, and bowls of gravy. The National Archives records that new men put on about 12 pounds each in their first two months. An Army officer ran each camp, handling the mess hall, barracks, morning flag, and bed check.
But once a crew walked past the edge of camp, it belonged to a project superintendent from the agency that owned the land. These superintendents were often local woodsmen and tradesmen, hired under a rule change on April 22 that allowed camps to bring in men from the surrounding country. The enrollees shortened their title to “LEMs”—local experienced men—and remembered them as stern but good teachers. They showed the boys how to use tools, how to work together, and then sent them into the woods.
The work itself was varied. In Virginia, crews cut rights-of-way for roads through the forest. In Texas, veterans of the First World War spent years carving Park Road 5 down the wall of Palo Duro Canyon, an 800-foot drop in a little over a mile. Their camps were full of grown men, since the rules that excluded married and older men did not apply to them.
Over four and a half years, seven CCC companies worked the canyon, including two companies of Black enrollees. The park opened to the public in 1934, and crews kept building around visitors. They constructed stone cabins, stone bridges, culverts, and a lodge named El Coronado. The last company pulled out in December 1937.
At Pere Marquette State Park in Illinois, CCC crews worked from 1933 to 1939 on a lodge above the Illinois River. The limestone came from the Grafton Rock quarry and went into the cabins, the lodge floor, and the great room fireplace, which weighs 700 tons. The timber frame used logs up to three feet across. The metalwork—chandeliers, door handles, window locks—was also made by the enrollees, who had come in swinging axes and left behind hardware.
The lodge opened for business in 1940 at a cost of $352,912. Because enrollees served six-month hitches, the boys who set the first stone of the fireplace were probably not the ones who set the last. In Virginia, the Park Service set a different target: six parks opened on the same morning. Douthat State Park, in the Allegheny Mountains near Clifton Forge, was donated by a group of businessmen headed by Robert Douthat.
CCC crews started work there on June 15, 1933, and three companies divided the task: one did forestry and trails, one built the park office, shelters, beach building, and first 25 cabins, and one built a dam and spillway across Wilson Creek, creating a 50-acre lake. On June 15, 1936, three years to the day after work began, Douthat opened to the public. It opened alongside Westmoreland, Hungry Mother, Fairy Stone, Staunton River, and Seashore, now called First Landing. Six state parks in a single morning, a whole state park system in one day, the first time any state had done that.
CCC crews had built all six. In 1935, the age limits were widened to 17 through 28. By the end of August that year, the CCC hit its peak: a little over half a million men in between 2,600 and 2,900 camps. The Army that did not exist in March 1933 was now several times the size of the regular Army.
By then, the CCC had also become something the 1933 law never mentioned: the country’s fire crew. In the first summer, when a logging fire in Oregon’s Gales Creek Canyon blew up into the Tillamook Burn, CCC camps were working the fire lines within a day. After that, every fire season brought the call. Enrollees remembered bus rides down the coast to one fire and up toward the Canadian border to the next.
“1939 was a terrible year for fires,” one said. “You just kept going until you practically fell over. ”
In August 1937, smoke went up in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. Lightning had hit pine timber along Blackwater Creek about 35 miles west of Cody on August 18.
The fire smoldered for two days before hunters spotted the smoke on August 20, when it covered about two and a half acres. Seven enrollees from the CCC camp at Wapiti were sent out that afternoon to start scraping a fire line. By the next day, some 70 more enrollees and rangers were on the move, with about 50 more coming from the CCC camp at Ten Sleep in the Big Horn National Forest. By afternoon on August 21, it was 90 degrees and the relative humidity was 6 percent.
At 3:00, a dry weather front moved in, and the wind blew steady out of the southwest at 30 mph. Fifteen minutes later, it swung around to the west with gusts up to 45 mph. The windshift drove the fire into the crowns of the pines and threw it over the lines the crews had been digging. Ranger Alfred Clayton, 45, had a crew of eight men, himself included.
They were trapped near a dam they had built. Clayton and six of his men died on the mountain; the eighth died later in the hospital. The whole crew was lost. Ranger Urban Post had about 40 men.
When the fire came over the ridge, he got them onto a rocky outcrop and made them lie flat. For about three hours, they moved around on the rock, shifting away from each wave of heat. Bob Johnson, an 18-year-old enrollee, remembered hearing men somewhere below and not being able to get down to help. “It was a terrible thing,” he said.
Post kept his crew on the rock until the smoke thinned enough for them to walk off. Fifteen firefighters died on the Blackwater fire, most of them CCC enrollees. Thirty-eight more were burned, many badly. Two men who came off the mountain alive, Roy Bevans and Ambrocio Garza, died later of their injuries.
The fire was controlled four days after it was found, having taken 1,700 acres of old timber. The investigation that followed changed how the country fights fire in the mountains. One investigator, David Godwin, put money into experiments with dropping firefighters by parachute so a crew could reach a remote fire while it was still small. By 1939, the Forest Service had a smoke jumper program tested at Winthrop, Washington, and at two sites in Montana.
After Blackwater, a fire in country like that could be reached from the air. While the CCC was learning what fire could do, one of its crews was hard at work on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee under a superintendent whose name the country already knew. Alvin York, born in 1887 in Pall Mall, Tennessee, had won the Medal of Honor on October 8, 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France. By 1935 he was 47, and he took a job as a project superintendent.
His project was a dam across Byrd Creek near Crossville, meant to be the centerpiece of the Cumberland Homesteads, a federal homestead project on the plateau. Company 3464, working under the National Park Service, started the dam in 1935 and finished in 1938. It is a dam and a bridge in one, stretching more than 300 feet across the creek, standing 28 feet tall, with water going over it through a row of seven arched spillways. The outer stone is Crab Orchard stone, a sandstone that comes out of the ground right there on the plateau.
Inside the stone face is a core of concrete. The enrollees crushed the local sandstone themselves, partly by hand with hammers and partly with a hammer mill run off the motor from a 1918 Pierce Arrow. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia and the park’s friends group, it is the largest masonry structure the CCC ever built anywhere in the country. That same year, the federal government deeded 1,427 acres around the dam to the state of Tennessee, and Cumberland Mountain State Park was born.
The crews stayed on until 1941 building trails, picnic areas, cabins, a boat house, and a bath house. York stayed as the park’s superintendent until 1940, the year the park officially opened. He resigned to advise on the filming of the movie about his life, “Sergeant York. ”
The kind of boy coming into the camps kept changing with the rules.
In 1937, the age limits moved again, to 17 through 23. That winter, a 16-year-old named Clinton Dean came into a camp at South River in Shenandoah National Park. He had finished the sixth grade, and when asked if he had fudged his age, he nodded. He had not exactly volunteered either.
He had been, as he put it, a little unruly, and a judge suggested he spend the next two years in the CCC rather than appear in court again. Dean cut chestnut trees, built fire trails, fought fires, drove a dump truck, and trained for fire tower duty. He boxed in camp. For a boy who had stopped at the sixth grade, the camps offered night courses, and enrollees could finish high school or learn to read and write.
On weekends, he often walked six miles down off the ridge to Greene County. Fifty-eight years later, back in the park for an interview, he said he wished young people still had something like it. By the time York left the plateau, the calendar was running out on the whole CCC. John Cochan was 16 when he joined from a family in Pennsylvania, and years later he still had the date down cold: October 27, 1941.
He joined out of necessity, his word for it. He had heard about the camps by word of mouth from older men who had gone in back in 1933, and he called himself the last one to get into the CCC. He went from camp to camp on his own. First Cedar Run, Pennsylvania, doing forestry work.
Then Camp S-95 at Leaport, then Goldsboro, where CCC boys were building firing ranges at an army base. Six weeks after he signed up, on December 7, 1941, he was in camp when the news came that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. From that morning on, the whole program was living on borrowed time. Cochan was sent to Idaho, to Priest Lake near the Canadian border, clearing blister rust and felling timber.
He was told the work was preparation for building a highway up through Canada to Alaska. For him and his crew, it never happened; the war got there first. In 1942, Congress stopped paying for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Enrollment had been falling since Pearl Harbor, and the camps were being emptied and torn down.
The program formally ended on June 30, 1942—one day short of another July 1. It was born racing that date, and it ended right up against it. Cochan got his discharge through the army at the depot in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, because, as he put it, the CCC had been abolished and the Army took total control of it. Asked years later whether it had been worth it, Cochan said definitely.
In his camps there were Jewish, Irish, Italian, and German boys all thrown in together, and he said he learned to get along with people from every walk of life and never unlearned it. Over nine years, about three million young men passed through the CCC. They served in about 4,500 camps in every state and in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. They planted somewhere between two and three billion trees.
They built more than 40,000 bridges and 3,470 fire lookout towers. Across the country, the CCC developed about 800 state parks, building the roads, cabins, lodges, dams, and trails that turned land on a map into a park people could use. The Park Service also ran CCC work in city and county parks and in the national parks. When the war came, the camps turned out to have been a kind of preparation for it.
One Oregon man said that when he got into the military, he knew more about what he was going to be doing than men who had never been through a camp; the discipline was already in them. Another said the camps taught him early that he could handle anything that came along. A third said the boys who came in went out as men. Ashton Burrus, the farm boy from Bumpass, Virginia, who lied about his age to get into Camp Roosevelt, served his two-year hitch and then went west into West Virginia.
He worked for a contractor until he got a job in the coal mines around Beckley. His first coal, he said, he loaded for 39 cents a ton. He stayed in the mines for 33 years. The roads, lodges, and dams the enrollees built did not go into the mines or the war with them.
They stayed where they were put. Camp Roosevelt ran from the spring of 1933 until 1942, growing from four barracks of 48 men each to 24 buildings. The old CCC enrollees of the Shenandoah chapter held reunions at Skyland for decades, and it was there that Burrus and Cochan sat down with park volunteers to record their stories. Douthat has grown to more than 4,500 acres, and the lake Company 1373 made out of Wilson Creek is still there.
In 1986, the park was added to the Virginia Landmark Register and, three months later, to the National Register of Historic Places. At Cumberland Mountain State Park, you can still drive across York’s Dam, with the lake on one side and the creek on the other. The bath house, stone water tank, pump house, and stone drinking fountains the crews built are still standing. At Pere Marquette, the lodge still takes overnight guests, and the great room with the 700-ton fireplace is still the heart of the building.
In Texas, Palo Duro Canyon is now about 28,000 acres, close to twice what the parks board got in 1933. Visitors still go down into the canyon on Park Road 5, and El Coronado Lodge is now the park’s visitor center. The stone cabins on the rim and the cow camp cabins on the floor are still overnight cabins. Along the highway west of Cody, Wyoming, stands a memorial to the men who died on the Blackwater Fire.
On the second anniversary of the fire, 500 local people turned out to dedicate a stone monument 71 feet long. Up in the forest, at the end of a 12-mile round trip you can only make on foot or on horseback, there are two smaller monuments. CCC crews built those themselves in 1938 for their own. The law passed on that March day never mentioned a canyon road, a fireplace on a bluff, or a stone dam on a plateau.
On that day, not one of the young men who would build them had been found yet. By that summer, they were in the woods. The camps are gone now, and nearly all of the men are gone with them. But the lodge they raised on that bluff in Illinois is still standing, long after the last of them put down his axe.
In 1942, the Army took on the road to Alaska that Cochan never got to build—the story of how America cut 1,700 miles of highway through wilderness in eight months.