Initiated in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the nation’s largest and most successful public works programs. Photo courtesy Civilian Conservation Corps
Driving into Camp Rabideau in the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota, visitors can’t help but notice the ghost-town aura of the place. The camp is set amongst birch trees whose white bark matches the trim on the buildings. It was a little city back in 1935, with its own hospital, mess hall and education building. Weathered green structures—the remaining thirteen of twenty-five—are set about 100 feet apart and form a loop with a clearing in the center. Some 200 Civilian Conservation Corps “boys” assembled here every morning before they began their work day, which involved building fire towers, tree planting and searching for lost hunters and berry pickers. It’s easy to imagine them headed to the canteen for a soft drink or to play a game of ping pong at the end of the day.
The people who built this site—and those who lived here while they did forestry work—were paid by the federal government in one of the biggest public works programs ever initiated. The CCC was established in 1933 to provide relief for the country’s economic plunge resulting from the Great Depression. As the Obama administration’s stimulus package begins to infiltrate our economy, forest managers may have funds not only to restore buildings constructed more than seventy years ago by the CCC, but to create projects that would leave a similar legacy for future generations.
Robert Harper, forest supervisor on the Chippewa National Forest, is putting together a list of priorities for stimulus funds. It includes road decommissioning, timber stand improvement and maintenance on recreation sites and roads. “It’s a great opportunity not only to get those jobs done,” Harper says, “but if we can contribute to putting people back to work as well and relieve some of the strain and difficulties in local communities, we’re looking forward to being a part of that.”
In the mid-1930s, CCC programs paved the way for moving the country back to prosperity, says Andrea LeVasseur, heritage program manager on the Chippewa. “People were starving; they were losing their homes to foreclosure, so it really did bring us out of the Depression. In rural areas, the CCC was key in putting people back to work, and for a lot of families, that twenty-five dollars a month the CCC enrollee sent home was their major income.”
LeVasseur is making a list of forest projects that need attention too, and at the top is the restoration of Camp Rabideau, one of the best surviving examples of a CCC camp focused on forest management and conservation. She believes one of the reasons the camp has survived is that it was used by the University of Illinois for engineering and forestry schools from 1946 until 1972.
The camp was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006, and Rabideau has already had some restoration work done by the Minnesota Conservation Corps, a state training program for youth, and by Passport in Time volunteers. Four of the modular buildings, which were originally shipped to the camp on rail cars, have been restored, but the budget to refurbish the remaining structures is $1.3 million. Rolf Anderson of the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota says the camp is a remarkable New Deal survivor, and that it has national, not just local, significance. “The CCC was one of the greatest conservation programs in the history of the United States,” he said during a visit to the camp in 1991. “This camp is so rare; it speaks volumes about this country’s history.”
Forest historian Walt Okstad says there is plenty of conservation work to be done on Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, which celebrates its centennial this year. Fuels reduction, reforestation, campground enhancement, maintenance and refurbishing of campsites and building portage trails in the Boundary Waters are all projects waiting in the wings. “And our historic structures, many of which were built by the CCC, have a backlog of deferred maintenance,” he says. Replacing rotted logs and refurbishing cabins would link the Depression-era past to future generations.
WORK FOR THE WILLING
CCC camps, of which there were 2,650 nationwide, existed in all forty-eight states as well as the territories of Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Most followed standard Army design and consisted of about fifteen buildings, a flagpole, a bulletin board and gravel paths or boardwalks connecting the buildings. The Army was responsible for feeding and clothing the workers, and the U.S. Forest Service or other public agencies handled the work programming. In 1937, education and training formally became a part of the CCC. Many of the young men learned to read and write, earned high school diplomas or learned a trade.
The education building is one of the restored structures at Rabideau. Retired teacher Dorothy Njegovan, who grew up in northern Minnesota, remembers a CCC enrollee graduating with her high school class. “Buzz” Ryan, camp forester during the CCC days, said in Barbara Sommers’ history of the CCC in Minnesota, Hard Work and a Good Deal, that “many of the boys credit the education they got in the camps for the jobs they had.”
Lowell Laager of Calumet, Minnesota, joined the CCC in 1940 to help support his widowed mother. Now eighty-six, Laager remembers hauling coal for the barracks’ stoves and carrying bags of silver dollars from the bank to pay up to 200 men in his camp each month. Three and a half million young, unmarried men served in the program, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt established just two days after he was inaugurated. The CCC was responsible for constructing buildings of stone and logs as well as planting 3 million trees, fighting forest fires and building roads, bridges, dams and other projects across the United States. “Everybody knows about the roads and the firefighting and the tree planting,” says Okstad, of the Superior National Forest, “but the CCC actually did anything anyone could think of that would be beneficial to the program of either state or federal conservation efforts.”
BOYS TO MEN
According to Sommers, the typical CCC enrollee was unemployed, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, weighed 147 pounds and stood 5’ 8” tall. Most gained at least ten pounds—some gained thirty—and grew an inch while they were in the CCC. They also adopted a work ethic and developed self-confidence while they helped support their families. From the 6:30 a.m. bugle to “Taps” at 10:30 p.m., the CCC camps were run like Army camps. Enrollees’ pay was thirty dollars a month, and twenty-five of that was sent home to their dependents. They could spend the remaining five dollars in canteens where almost everything cost a nickel—candy bars, a sack of Bull Durham tobacco, cigarette wrappers, pop and ice cream.
Mealtimes were strict, monitored by a leader who told the men where to sit and how many helpings they were allowed. But by Depression standards the food was sumptuous: pancakes or eggs, bacon, cereal, juice, coffee and milk for breakfast and roast beef, potatoes and vegetables with cake, doughnuts or pie for dinner.
“We had very good food,” Laager says. “We lined up outside the mess hall in orderly fashion until the mess cook opened the door….We were seated at the same table, same place every meal. You waited until the cook gave the order to eat. There was no smoking in the mess hall, no loud talking….It was a real good learning experience for me for when I went into the Navy because it was the same routine there.”
Life in the camps wasn’t all work. During their leisure time, the young men could participate in baseball, basketball, hockey, wrestling, boxing and tennis. Once a week, Laager drove the men into town for a movie, a dance or rollerskating. Njegovan remembers CCC boys attending her church and local girls dating boys from a nearby camp. Many camps published their own newspaper. Other activities included music, skating, skiing, fishing, swimming, hiking, woodworking and gardening. Nearby communities benefited because CCC camps often often hired employees—referred to as “local experienced men”—to educate and mentor the boys. The camps purchased most materials locally, and enrollees spent money in town.
In 1933, Minnesota was in dire need of conservation work. Much of its forest land had been logged off, and 35 percent of the state’s land was tax delinquent. The state was ripe for programs like the CCC that would provide cheap labor for forest restoration and soil conservation. From 1933 to 1942, when the last camp closed, Minnesota had 148 CCC camps with 77,000 enrollees. The Chippewa National Forest had twenty-three camps, and the Superior National Forest had thirty.
The CCC legacy is visible across the United States today in the trees that were planted and the 125,000 miles of roads, 13,100 miles of hiking trails and 800 state parks that were built. In Minnesota, CCC workers planted nearly 124 million trees. Several crews averaged 1,000 trees per planter per day, and competitions often rewarded the team planting the most trees in a week with a keg of beer.
STURDY THEY STAND
In Minnesota, the largely untrained CCC members built beautiful rustic structures of local stone and logs. Many of these historic buildings still exist on the Chippewa National Forest. Several are on the National Register of Historic Places, including the Marcell Ranger Station, the Shingobee Ski Chalet and Norway Beach Visitor Center. The most impressive is the Forest Supervisor’s office at Cass Lake, still in use for administrative offices. Built from 150-year-old red pine logs skidded from Lake Thirteen nearby, the three-story structure cost $225,000 to build in 1935. A master woodsman supervised the Finnish-style technique, and logs were traced, notched and grooved by hand. Hand-hammered ironwork on the doors and hinges is original as are gnarled stairway railings made from frost-damaged maple and hand-hewn split log steps. A fifty-foot high fireplace of split and matched glacial boulders, native to the area, serves as the structure’s centerpiece.
Other masterpiece structures include Itasca State Park’s Forest Inn, the largest CCC building in the state, and the Old Timer’s Cabin. A 1935 national park publication describes the cabin as “almost humorous in its scale, it is far from that as a reminder of magnificent forests all but extinct.” Its walls are built with massive white pine logs—twenty-one to more than thirty inches in diameter—and are only four logs high. They were peeled with single-blade axes and finished with drawknives. The three roof purlins, the horizontal logs that support the roof deck, are eighteen-inch pine logs, and the roof is made of hand-hewn white cedar shingles. The Isabella Ranger Station, the guard cabin on Kekekabic Lake, the Sawbill Cabin Guard Station on the Sawbill Trail and the South Kawishiwi Pavilion are all CCC structures still in use on the Superior National Forest.
SEEDLINGS INTO FORESTS
During the CCC era, Minnesota’s Superior National Forest expanded to 2 million acres, and Minnesota’s state park system grew from thirty to forty-seven units. According to Okstad, “All the things the CCC did led toward the Superior National Forest being what it is now in the public’s perception. There were very few campgrounds and very few roads prior to the CCC, and there were a lot more of both afterward as a result of their efforts.”
LeVasseur credits the CCC with building the Chippewa National Forest, which expanded to its present 666,000 acres during that era. “Before the 1930s this was just a small forest,” she says. “During the 1930s, when we had all this cheap labor from the CCC and the government had programs to buy up the lands that were in foreclosure, that’s when we built the forest. Many of the cutover lands were abandoned, and there was no replanting, so it was the CCC that developed the planting. We had two huge nurseries here that supplied millions of trees. The CCC literally planted this forest, and of course, they built all the infrastructure.”
While the CCC legacy is most visible in forests, structures and parks, it also made a major difference in the lives of the enrollees and their families. Harvey Richart of Virginia, Minnesota, whose father died when he was fifteen, joined the CCC at the age of eighteen.
“That twenty-five dollars that went home every month just made the difference to my mother and the five kids still at home,” he said in Sommers’ book.
Most enrollees remember their CCC work with pride and say the experience had a lasting impact on their lives. “What the CCC accomplished will never again be equaled,” Richart said. “It made our lives for the rest of our time.”