Civilian Conservation Corps
On April 17, 1933, the first Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Camp Roosevelt, was established in the George Washington National Forest in northwest Virginia. There would be 14 more CCC camps built on the George Washington and Thomas Jefferson national forests, both in Virginia. A sad note is that, other than Camp Roosevelt, those other 14 camps are hard to find.
Camp Roosevelt has been preserved and offers visitors some insight to the camp, the CCC, and the enrollees who called the camp home but it tells only part of the story. People point to the following statistics to explain what the CCC did:
- more than 3,470 fire towers erected
- 97,000 miles of fire roads built
- 4,235,000 man-days devoted to fighting fires
- more than 3 billion trees planted
- disease and insect control
- forest improvement — timber stand inventories, surveying, and reforestation
- forest recreation development — campgrounds built, complete with picnic shelters, swimming pools, fireplaces, and restrooms.
What the numbers don’t show nor the interpretative signs illustrate is the impact on the young men, all of whom were unmarried, unskilled, many unable to read or write, unemployed, and between the ages of 17 and 25. What the CCC really did was far more than put thousands of young man to work or plant billions of trees. Not only did the CCC provide us, today, with some fabulous recreational opportunities in our national forests but gave us a generation to look back at and admire what they did. The CCC gave us role models and we shouldn’t forget that.
There are few ruminates of CCC camps left to remind us we owe a great deal to those young men who are now old or gone. It makes the preservation of places like Camp Roosevelt in Virginia and Camp Rabideau in MN all the more important.
