They worked for $1 a day, and most were glad to get it.
A new exhibit at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma tells the story of the Civilian Conservation Corps — a New Deal-era program that lifted young men out of Great Depression poverty and put them to work building infrastructure in state and national parks and working in soil conservation, water reclamation and forestry.
“Natural Remedy — The Civilian Conservation Corps in Washington & Oregon” takes up most of the space in the museum’s temporary exhibit gallery and runs through Jan. 7. Compared to other WSHM shows, it’s heavier on text and imagery and lighter on artifacts. Most of the CCC’s legacy isn’t so much tools as it is in the trails, buildings and infrastructure it built in parks and on wild lands.
Founding the CCC
President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the CCC in 1933 as a way to provide both employment for men as well as bolster the nation’s parks and agricultural resources. It would last nine years.
Recruited from across the country, the CCC eventually employed 11,400 men just in Washington. If you’ve visited a national park you might have walked on a trail, peered from a roadside lookout or used a quaint stone-constructed restroom built by the Corps’s young workers.
Eventually, 57 camps were built in Washington with each housing about 200 men. Only men between 18 and 25 could join.
Segregation and exclusion
The CCC — or the C’s as it was sometimes called — was open only to single men. While Blacks were allowed to join, they were housed in camps separate from whites except in Washington and Oregon.
Head WSHM curator Gwen Whiting attributes that to the region’s remoteness from major Black population areas.
“Washington didn’t have a large Black community at the time, compared to other states, but had Black civic leaders and community founders since the beginning of its history,” Whiting said.
Still, Black CCC members were recalled back to their home states in 1934 because of national policies, she said.
“Sadly, our integrated camps didn’t last very long,” Whiting said.
The inherent defects of the CCC’s exclusion of women, its racial segregation and its immigrants-need-not-apply policies were obvious to critics even in 1933, including Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor.
It was Eleanor who pushed for what became known as SheSheShe camps. The camps for women were established by President Roosevelt as a counterpart to the CCC. They eventually helped 8,500 unemployed women.
A photo in the exhibit shows an all Black camp at Mount Rainier National Park, named after CCC director Robert Fechner. An all Black crew built the Longmire lodge in the park.
Another photo shows a Black team at Rainbow Falls State Park in Lewis County in 1934.
Camp life
With a summer-camp-meets-the-Army feel, CCC camps featured barracks and communal dining. The camps provided room and board for the men, something not all had in the outside world. On average, a CCC member gained 12 pounds in his first two months in the Corps, according to the exhibit.
During their leisure time, men could pursue sports, music, games and weekend trips to the nearest towns for dances and other social activities.
Around 1,300 camps were built nation-wide in the program’s first year. They were overseen by U.S. Army officers.
The men were recruited through their local welfare agencies and they signed on for six-month commitments. Of their $30 monthly salary, they were required to send $25 back to the families.
Working wild
Many of the Corps members were from the city and had never been to wilderness areas. Others were raised in rural areas and had poor educations. Some couldn’t read or write.
“When they got letters, they’d save them ’til I got there,” remembered Carroll Aust, who served with Company 297 in Vancouver, Washington, and is quoted in the exhibit. “Then I’d be sitting in the recreation hall reading the letters to them that their parents had had somebody else write for them.”
About 75 percent of CCC members worked in the forestry division. All told, they planted an estimated 3 billion trees across the nation, according to the exhibit.
Others built fences, roads, bridges, irrigation canals and fire watchtowers — 240 in Washington. They cleared brush and strung thousands of miles of telephone lines — the 1930s equivalent of bringing high speed internet to 2023 rural America.
Along with projects at Olympic and Rainier national parks, CCC crews built infrastructure at Saltwater in Des Moines, Twanoh in Union, Millersylvania in Thurston County and other Washington state parks.
Indian Division
Washington’s tribes were also hard hit by the Depression. Some reservations had more than 50 percent unemployment. Roosevelt created the Indian Emergency Conservation Work Division, better known as the CCC Indian Division. It employed 1,500 Native Americans in Washington during its first year.
The Indian Division differed from the main CCC ranks by allowing Native Corps members to work on projects on their own reservations in contrast to getting shipped to another state. Indian members could return home at night, rather than bunk in camps.
Married Indian men and men over 25 also were allowed to join the Corps. By the time the CCC ended, 25 percent of all Native men in the United States had been a member, according to the exhibit.
Legacy
Today, high up in Olympic National Park, a CCC-built trail is carved into a rocky mountain face near Ludden Peak. But halfway across the traverse it ends abruptly. The trail would have taken hikers into the Bailey Range. Today, mountaineers are left to find their own way to the fabled sub range of the Olympics.
Trail lore says the construction ended when the CCC shut down in 1942. While it’s no Mount Rushmore, the trail to nowhere marks a historical point in time. The muscle used to build trails was soon being used to dig trenches in World War II.
While the CCC is gone, there are modern versions of the program like the Oregon-based Northwest Youth Corps, the National Park Service’s Youth Conservation Corps and the California Conservation Corps.
If you go
What: “Natural Remedy — The Civilian Conservation Corps in Washington & Oregon”
When: Now through Jan. 7, 2024 (10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday)
Where: Washington State History Museum, 1911 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
Admission: $18 adult, $11 senior, student and military; free for 5 and younger.
Information: washingtonhistory.org/exhibit/natural-remedy/
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