The C.C.C. State-By-State: California

California, state number five in our state-by-state tour of the CCC, is another state that garnered a good deal of space in Perry Merrill’s book Roosevelt’s Forest Army, originally published in 1981. California had a lot of CCC camps. Merrill reports that in 1937 for example, there were 101 camps in California, divided as follows between the various technical services: 50 National Forest camps, 15 State Park camps, 11 National Park camps, 10 Private Forest camps, 9 Soil Conservation Service camps, 3 Division of Grazing camps, 1 Bureau of Reclamation camp and 1 Military Reservation camp.
In nearly a decade of work, the CCC accounted for some $25.6 million in allotments to dependents and for that money, enrollees built 306 lookout towers and houses, strung 8,704 miles of telephone wire, built over a million miles of truck trails and minor roads and performed tree and plant disease control on nearly 800,000 acres of land, among countless other projects. (Again, these figures are cited in detail in Merrill’s Roosevelt’s Forest Army.)

The 1937 Annual Report of the Director of Emergency Conservation Work reported the monthly enrollment numbers for California for fiscal year 1937 as follows:

July 1936: 10,150
August 1936: 9,048
September 1936: 7,961
October 1936: 8, 565
November 1936: 7,966
December 1936: 7,474
January 1937: 8,759
February 1937: 8,225
March 1937: 6,118
April 1937: 7,826
May 1937: 6,951
June 1937: 6,086

These figures represent the monthly enrollment totals for California, not the total number of enrollees working in California.

California is located in U.S. Forest Service Region 9 and the Forest Service’s history of the Civilian Conservation Corps includes an entire section devoted to work in California, which you can access here.

Reportedly, the largest single undertaking by the CCC in California is the Ponderosa Way, an 800-mile long firebreak and truck trail cut through the Stanislas National Forest. The Forest Service history includes reference to this massive project:

The project, first proposed by the regional forester in 1929, was made possible only by the extra labor provided by the CCC. On July 21, 1933, Show told national forest supervisors in the proposed Ponderosa Way areas about his plan to construct “a real fire line with a truck trail along it down the length of the Sierra and the north Coast Range located near the lower edge of the present timber lands.

In 2009 the Forest Service sponsored a Passport in Time project that put volunteers in the Ponderosa Way region with metal detectors to see what sorts of artifacts they could unearth. The results of the survey and recovery of artifacts might be characterized as a mixed bag. A brief write up by a USFS archaeologist, Stacy Lundgren states in part: “While some of the artifacts had little to do with the Ponderosa way and more to do with 1950s-era household trash, enough items were located to tell us we were on the right track. Historic maps and aerial photographs provided the clues to where to look and our volunteers provided the enthusiasm and dedication in the looking itself. This project was just the beginning in the planned documentation and interpretation of this significant resource.”

The history of fire suppression by the CCC is certainly nothing new and California had its share of fires to be fought, both forest fires and structure fires. I’m blessed in that I have corresponded with lots of former CCC enrollees over the years and one gentleman who’s been a font of information pertaining to CCC camps throughout California is Gordon Anderson. Gordie wrote to me some time back regarding a particular fire that occurred while he was assigned to the CCC camp at Big Basin, California. Here it is in his words:
While I was stationed in Big Basin, I was attached to the Forestry Fire Station in Felton, California just down the road – car fires, structure fires, and one forest fire – the Mountain Charlie Gulch Fire. That one was arson, started by an old guy riding a mule up the canyon and throwing lighted newspaper into the brush as he rode. He was spotted by a forestry plane, so when he rode out at the head end of the canyon, we were waiting for him. We took him back to the fire camp, gave him a drink, food, and a shovel and put him to work on the line – no rest, no relief. After two straight shifts of being booted onto his feet whenever he sat down, and full exposure to the fun of fighting fire, we turned him over to the sheriff, who wasn’t much more friendly than we were!

Gordie also recounted many humorous incidents that occurred during his time in the CCC in California. One incident involved an effort to establish a new pit latrine for the camp. Gordie wrote:
Dynamite figured in several of our little adventures – we used a lot of it. One of the messier ones: Our old privy had been there for several years and was plenty full, so the camp crew dug a new one just up the hill from the old one. The soil in those hills isn’t very absorbent, so the foreman handed a couple of the new boys a case of 40% and told them to load and shoot the hole to open it up for drainage, so they did and used the entire case! Unfortunately, they didn’t listen too closely to what he said and they loaded the wrong hole – the old one! When that blast when off it spread a thick layer of crap over the whole camp and believe me, it didn’t smell like no rose garden either! It still had a fairly strong perfume when we transferred out of there to Empire Meadows in Yosemite, several months later.

Gordie also commented on the impact the CCC experience had on him personally: I am sure that the experience in the CCC helped me a lot in later years; taught me how to obey orders (even if I thought they were stupid) and surely helped me to learn from my experiences. For instance, I learned not to sleep under a truck. On the Red Hill Fire, we were relieved, fed and I grabbed a blanket to get some rest. I flaked out under a truck and corked off and when I awoke, the truck was gone – never heard a thing. Fortunately, the Lord was with me that time. My brain certainly wasn’t!

The website of the Conference of California Historical Societies includes a brief nod to the work of the CCC.

There’s a very nice series of web pages devoted to the work of the CCC in California, over at the California State Parks website. The site has multiple components and links to photos, brochures and other items of interest. There is also a list of featured state parks that includes La Purisima Mission, Big Basin Redwoods and Mount Diablo.

The true total number of enrollees killed while in the CCC may never be known. The CCC newspaper Happy Days reported some of the fatalities, but certainly not all of them. A current ongoing project of mine has been to gather data on CCC fatalities so I’ll close with a tidbit or two regarding CCC fatalities in California. One of the first CCC fatalities in California, as reported in Happy Days, was that of Cecil Loomis who was evidently killed when a CCC truck collided with an automobile. Cecil’s death was reported in the February 3rd edition of Happy Days. And it was just a couple months later that an enrollee by the name of Jones was crushed when the cement mixer he was helping move slipped off the truck, crushing young Jones to death

If you’d like to get some background on the purpose and scope of the State-By-State series, you can read the initial entry by clicking here.

As with all the posts in the State-By-State series the camp location map was taken from Cohen's Tree Army and the camp locations highlighted. All photos are from the USFS and appear in Cohen's Tree Army except the image of the snow covered CCC camp, which is an image of the Big Basin CCC camp provided by Gordie Anderson.

The C.C.C. State-By-State: Arkansas

In Roosevelt’s Forest Army, Perry Merrill devotes a good deal of space to a detailed accounting of CCC work in Arkansas (nearly 2 and a half pages, whereas Arizona garners barely a half page). We’ll find as we progress through all the states and territories that some places simply have better documentation of their CCC work and perhaps this is what Mr. Merrill encountered when he created his entry for Arkansas.

Let’s start with some simple statistics from Roosevelt’s Forest Army. An astounding 62, 882 individuals from all states worked in the CCC in Arkansas between 1933 and 1942. In that time, the CCC built 4,956 bridges of varying types, strung 6,956 miles of telephone line, built 82,190 check dams and made forest stand improvements to some 496,000 acres of land.

The 1937 Annual Report of the Director of Emergency Conservation Work includes a state-by-state monthly breakdown of the numbers of enrollees from each state. Enrollment in Arkansas for fiscal year 1937 stacked up like this:

July 1936: 8,539
August 1936: 8,144
September 1936: 6,226
October 1936: 11,049
November 1936: 10,681
December 1936: 10,307
January 1937: 10,291
February 1937: 9,976
March 1937: 7,471
April 1937: 10,329
May 1937: 9,931
June 1937: 9,295

(Keep in mind that these figures represent the number of enrollees who enrolled in Arkansas, not the number of enrollees actually working in Arkansas on a month-to-month basis. The title of the table cited is "Total enrolled strength of the Civilian Conservation Corps by States in which enrolled...")

Merrill notes that the average number of CCC camps in Arkansas was 37 and at one time 64 camps, employing 13,000 men were in operation in the state. (The map illustration is a detail from Stan Cohen’s book The Tree Army. The map from which this was taken was a 1938 illustration of CCC camps nationwide. I’ve isolated Arkansas and highlighted the camps with colored blocks to make it easier to read. Remember that this map doesn’t show every camp that operated in the state of Arkansas between 1933 and 1942; better to look at this as a snapshot of camp locations in 1938.)

Among the noteworthy accomplishments specifically cited by Merrill: The construction of 80 forest lookouts statewide, a three thousand seat amphitheatre in Crowley’s Ridge State Park, soil conservation work statewide, including the planting of sod, construction of check dams and planting of trees. At the White River Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, CCC enrollees planted grasses to provide food for the birds.

There is a nice history of the CCC in Arkansas entitled (appropriately) "The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arkansas, 1933-1942 available on line. Written by Sandra Taylor Smith, this piece, though brief, is surprising in its detail and even includes a nice bibliography. You’ll note that Perry Merrill’s book is listed in the bibliography, but strangely, there is no reference to John Salmond’s landmark study from the 1960s.

Smith notes that Arkansas was in the Seventh Corps Area with the Corps headquarters located in Omaha, Nebraska. Smith also points out that enrollees were sent to what was then Camp Pike in North Little Rock before being given their permanent camp assignment. Smith’s article is a useful piece of CCC research and an asset to anyone wishing to gain an insight into the work of the CCC in Arkansas.

One sad aspect of the CCC program that we’ll encounter as we progress through this state-by-state history is the incidence of racism in the selection, enrollment and deployment of minority groups, especially blacks and seemingly especially in the southern states. One could argue that the CCC’s only true failing was in the area of racial integration and equality. Though the legislation that created the Civilian Conservation Corps included language prohibiting discrimination based on race, problems cropped up almost immediately during the initial selection process in the individual states. For an excellent account of these initial problems and indeed a valuable discussion of the problem of racism in the CCC, see John Salmond’s groundbreaking work from the 1960s, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study. Of particular interest with respect to racial policy in the CCC is Salmond’s discussion in Chapter 5, “The Selection of Negroes, 1933-1937” (A copy of Salmond’s important work is now available online and can be viewed here.)

As for the issue of racism in Arkansas’s selection process, Salmond wrote:
Similarly (compared to Georgia), after investigating an NAACP complaint of discrimination in Arkansas, Persons (Frank W. Persons, director of CCC selection nationwide) again threatened to withhold quotas. The state’s indignant relief director, William A. Rooksbery, unequivocally denied the charge that no Negroes had been selected. No less than three had in fact been enrolled, he protested, but Persons was unimpressed, and told him so. The chastened state official promised to induct more within the following few weeks.

In a region of the country where blacks made up as much as 50 percent of the total population, the lack of recruitment of blacks for work in southern CCC camps is disgusting today, but must be viewed in light of the overriding system of prejudice at the time. Further, cases of racism were not confined to the southern states by any means and as we progress through the state-by-state histories we’ll see that camps were segregated by race nationwide and that all-black camps ran into local opposition in such seemingly progressive regions as California.
Salmond goes on to point out that, beyond the initial difficulty of actually getting young blacks selected and enrolled into the CCC, Arkansas citizens “accepted with equanimity many Negro camps.” But in the end, CCC Director Robert Fechner never forced the issue and, if local protests erupted due to the all-black nature of a CCC camp, he would order the camp closed or moved onto an Army reservation, for, as Salmond writes in Fechner’s own words, he was “a Southerner by birth and raising” and thus he, “clearly understood the Negro problem.”

For the Forest Service perspective on CCC work in Arkansas, be sure to visit their online history The Forest Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture also has terrific information about the work of the CCC in Arkansas, including some pictures!

Larry Sypolt’s invaluable book Civilian Conservation Corps: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography lists a couple of resources directly related to the CCC in Arkansas under the section of the book devoted to the 7th Corps Area. If you can’t find these articles or books on line, you might try your local librarian (For example, the Sandra Taylor Smith article referenced above, is listed in Sypolt and is available on line. Other sources may not be so easy to find, but will likely prove worth the effort if your project relates directly to the work of the CCC in Arkansas.) Among the Arkansas-related sources listed in Sypolt:
“Two Decades of State Forestry in Arkansas,” by Fred H. Long, published in Arkansas Historical Quarterly 24:3 (1965).
“A Brief History of Camp Sage: CCC Camp P-76, Stella, Arkansas,” by Burney B. McClurkan, Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department, 1994.
“The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arkansas: 1933-1934,” self-published by Charles A. O’Dell in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1995.

We’ll close this entry in the State-By-State series with a brief personal testimonial from an enrollee in Arkansas. In 1934 the American Forestry Association published a nifty little book entitled Youth Rebuilds: Stories from the C.C.C. The book is a series of stories or testimonials from CCC enrollees across the United States and it offers an interesting glimpse of the program when it was still in its earliest, formative years. Included in the book is a piece written by Robert R. Ross, an enrollee in Company 741 at Crystal Springs, Arkansas. (The first CCC camp to be established in Arkansas according to the Sandra Taylor Smith article previously noted.) Young Robert wrote, in part:

Every day in the woods I come across something that can be applied to the text of some book I have read. Thus, by observation and study, I am fitting myself for my chosen work. I now understand fully that phrase – “fresh start in a healthful occupation in the open.” The work and sunshine have been beneficial to my health beyond all measure. I have gained in weight and strength. I have felt better than at any time in the last few years. Maybe it is that full feeling I experience three times each day!

If you’d like to get some background on the purpose and scope of this series, you can read the initial entry in the State-By-State series by clicking here.

The photo is a detail from a larger image of Camp Nodak near Plainview Arkansas. The photo is dated November 1933. The 1934 Christmas menu from the Crowley’s Ridge camp lists the enrollees and Local Experienced Men at the camp and is from my document files.

The C.C.C. State-By-State: Arizona

This marks the third state entry in the State-By-State series. If you’d like to get some background on the purpose and scope of this series, you can read the initial entry in the State-By-State series by clicking here. Over time, there may be a need to go back and revise the individual state entries in order to add new information or correct the information that is already posted, so if you’re interested in a particular state, be sure to check back from time to time to see if there are any updates.

Arizona is another state for which there has been some worthwhile and very useful CCC research done in the not too distant past, most notably Robert Moore’s book on the CCC in Arizona’s Rim Country, which we’ll touch on in a moment.

First, let’s start with some statistics from Perry Merrill’s book Roosevelt’s Forest Army. Merrill notes that the number of individual camps in the state of Arizona numbered about fifty and that the aggregate number of Arizona men who were given work as a result of the CCC stands at 41,363. Between 1933 and 1942, CCC enrollees in Arizona strung 3,559 miles of telephone lines, built 512,093 erosion control check dams and planted an astounding 7.4 million trees! Merrill also briefly notes the work of the CCC in Phoenix, Tucson, Colossal Cave and the Hualpai Mountains though an error in the text makes it seem that the Hualapai Mountains are in or near Tucson, when in fact they are in the opposite corner of the state, near Kingman, Arizona. (You’ll also note the various spellings of “Hualapai”.)

For many years and importantly during the Great Depression, Arizona had a wonderful advocate in the person of Senator Carl Hayden. To read about the creation of the CCC camps at Phoenix South Mountain Park – including Senator Hayden’s role in the effort – click on my previous post about the CCC at South Mountain Park. It is safe to say that were it not for Senator Hayden, Phoenix would not have gotten at least two of the CCC camps that it was allotted during the 1930s. One can only imagine what other help Senator Hayden provided to insure the success of the CCC in Arizona.

The CCC also worked at Papago Park, another park located in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Lesser known though vaguely referenced in Roosevelt’s Forest Army, is the work at Hualapai Mountain Park near Kingman, Arizona. You can see an all too brief history of the park by clicking on the Mojave County Parks website here. The 1936 Phoenix District Annual reported that at that time Company 1837 was working at camp SP-8-A in the “Hualpai” Mountains. Prior to arriving near Kingman, Company 1837 worked at SP-1-A in Randolph Park near Tucson and then camp SP-6-A in Tucson’s Rincon Mountains. (The black and white photos of SP-8-A in this post are from that 1936 District Annual.) Given the fact that the place owes its existence to the CCC, more could be done to document and report on the work of the CCC at Hualapai Mountain Park.

A thumbnail sketch of the places where the CCC worked in Arizona would look something like this:
Multiple improvements like roads, ramadas and lookout structures at both Phoenix South Mountain Park and Papago Park, infrastructure and aesthetic improvements at Grand Canyon, both on the North and South Rims and down in the Canyon. Additionally, upgrades and improvements to the irrigation system in the metro Phoenix area and in the area around Yuma, erosion control work throughout the state, significant improvements at Colossal Cave and Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona, immeasurable improvements to the forest lands across the state and work at Petrified Forest.

Two books come to mind when discussing the work of the CCC in Arizona: Louis Lester Purvis’ wonderful book The Ace in the Hole: A Brief History of Company 818 of the Civilian Conservation Corps (1989) and Robert J. Moore’s more recent, more scholarly book The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona’s Rim Country: Working in the Woods (2006). Purvis’ book on the work of the CCC at Grand Canyon stands head and shoulders above other Arizona-related works because it is the only published text that is a personal narrative penned by a CCC veteran who worked in Arizona and I’ve been remiss in not posting a detailed review of it here or at the Forest Army blog. To read an earlier posting I did for Moore’s book, over at Forest Army click here. Bottom line: If you’re doing research on the work of the CCC in Arizona, these two books will be an important resource for you.

Other equally important if less in-depth coverage of CCC work in Arizona can be found in Sharon Hunt’s Images of America book entitled Vail and Colossal Cave Mountain Park and Donna and George Hartz’s Images of America book entitled The Phoenix Area’s Parks and Preserves, both published by Arcadia Publishing. (Any time to encounter an Arcadia Publishing Images of America title, be sure to scan through it for images and references to the CCC – you’ll be surprised at how often these titles include references to work done by the Forest Army during the 1930s.) Elsewhere, you’ll find references to the CCC in Letters from Wupatki by Courtney Reeder Jones and Bradford Luckingham’s Phoenix: A History of a Southwestern Metropolis. (Admittedly, the single reference to the CCC in Luckingham is a bit thin but the book also provides useful insight into life in Phoenix during the New Deal era.)

To view all of the Arizona-related posts over at the Forest Army blog, click here.

Interest in the work of the CCC in Arizona remains strong and the Arizona State Archives now maintains a set of all available issues of the CCC newspaper Happy Days on microfilm.

The map for this post (as with all maps used thus far) comes from a map of camp locations published in Cohen’s The Tree Army. The color photo of the CCC-built cabin comes from the Mojave County Parks website and the black and white images of the CCC camp at Hualpai Mountain Park are from the 1936 Phoenix District Annual.

The C.C.C. State-By-State: Alaska

The existing CCC documentation for the Alaska Territory seems nearly as remote as that largest of the 50 United States. Alaska had not yet entered the Union as a full-fledged state but was home to important CCC work nevertheless.

For some reason Alaska does not merit its own state-by-state summary in the back of Perry Merrill’s book Roosevelt’s Forest Army. However there is a two-paragraph reference to the Territory of Alaska in the early sections of the book. Merrill notes that Alaska did not have CCC camps per se, but instead enrollees remained in their own homes in their own communities and the work was largely seasonal, building truck trails, improving campground infrastructure and cruising timber. Merrill reports that in 1935 there were just 325 enrollees working in the territory and that all were middle-aged men.

A far more detailed account of the work of the CCC in Alaska can be found in the U.S. Forest Service’s online history The Forest Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The official history points out that in the Alaskan Territory, the CCC did not operate under the Army’s corps system but rather under the direct jurisdiction of the regional Forest Service office. The official history also contradicts Merrill’s reference to the non-camp set up of the CCC in Alaska, stating that the enrollees were stationed in “small, decentralized camps” in the existing national forests.

An especially interesting aspect of the CCC in Alaska is the involvement of the territory’s native peoples, including its Eskimo population, who were brought into the program in 1937 but dropped from participation just two years later over fears that the program was causing “too much dependence on the white man’s way.” One somewhat unusual project involving native peoples was the herding and butchering of reindeer and the harvesting of their brains for export.

The organizational structure of the CCC in Alaska was somewhat similar to the way in which the Indian Emergency Conservation Work program was organized in the Lower 48. Men were generally older in the Alaskan CCC program, they lived closer to home and sometimes in their own homes (compare this description to that given in Merrill’s brief summary) and they were allowed to keep more of their monthly pay than the typical CCC enrollee.

The Forest Service history also notes that the CCC contributed to national defense work in Alaska through their work helping build Annette Army Airfield as well as other major airfields. To see a brief history of Annette Island and its airfield, click here.

You’ll see a nice history of the CCC’s work at the Tongass National Forest website.

You might also be interested the book Alaska at War 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered, edited by Fern Chandonnet. Alaska at War includes a chapter on the work of the CCC in Alaska.

Regarding the images: All the pictures in this post were taken from Cohen's Tree Army. The surveyor with the plane table is working in Knudson Cove and the image is a USFS image. The other image shows CCC enrollees working on Annette Island and is cited by Cohen as a National Archives image.

The C.C.C. State-By-State: Alabama

To read the initial entry in the State-By-State series, click here.

The first entry in the State-By-State series is relatively easy, given that Robert Pasquill, Jr. did a state-specific study in 2008. Pasquill’s The Civilian Conservation Corps in Alabama, 1933-1942: A Great and Lasting Good is an asset for its appendices alone. Add in the fact that the book includes a disk of interviews with CCC enrollees and you’ve got an irresistible package for CCC buffs or anyone seeking information on Alabama CCC projects.

According to statistics cited by Merrill in Roosevelt’s Forest Army, the CCC in Alabama strung more than 1,800 miles of telephone lines, built over 3,000 miles of roads and truck trails, planted just over 60,000 trees and built 659 bridges of various types. Merrill reports that in 1937 the aggregate number of Alabama men employed by the CCC was 66,837 and that an estimated $16.4 million in allotments was made to dependents by enrollees.

Not surprisingly, Pasquill cites Merrill’s work in his summary of CCC accomplishments in Alabama. Pasquill also quotes at length from an article that ran in the July 16, 1942 edition of the Moulton Advertiser, just a couple weeks after the CCC was officially disbanded. I won’t run the entire entry here, but will pass along this small bit from the article, entitled “A Great and Lasting Good Accomplished by the CCC”:

[During the lifetime of the CCC] “CCC camps under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service and State Forester advanced the cause of forest conservation in Alabama by at least a generation both in the national forests and on state and privately owned land.”

As we’ll see with every state, Alabama’s CCC camps were like small towns and many camps had camp newspapers that sported names like Bull Thrower, Camp Jester, Mess Kit and See See See. Pasquill’s book includes a helpful list of camp newspapers in the appendices.

Pasquill’s list of Alabama CCC camps breaks them out under technical services: U.S. Forest Service, Soil Conservation Service, Tennessee Valley Authority, State Parks, Private Forest Projects and State Forest Projects. Additionally, while Alabama hosted a number of colored CCC companies and even some CCC companies comprised of black World War I veterans, Pasquill’s text isn’t particularly user-friendly for researchers looking for specific references to all-black CCC camps or CCC companies; there are no index listings to direct the reader to topics related to “race,” or “racism” or ‘African-American enrollees,” for example. On the other hand, a diligent reader or researcher will be able to cross-reference the camp listing against the individual camp histories to get an idea of where the all-black CCC companies worked in Alabama.

One could argue that the CCC’s only true failing was in the area of racial integration and equality; indeed the incidence of racism in the selection, enrollment and deployment of minority groups, especially blacks and seemingly especially in the southern states, is the one sad aspect of the CCC program that we’ll encounter consistently as we progress through this state-by-state history. Though the legislation that created the Civilian Conservation Corps included language prohibiting discrimination based on race, problems cropped up almost immediately during the initial selection process in the individual states. For an excellent account of these initial problems and indeed a valuable discussion of the problem of racism in the CCC, see John Salmond’s groundbreaking work from the 1960s, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study. Of particular interest with respect to racial policy in the CCC is Salmond’s discussion in Chapter 5, “The Selection of Negroes, 1933-1937” (A copy of Salmond’s important work is now available online and can be viewed here.)

So, despite this very minor shortcoming, let there be no doubt that if you’re looking for information on the CCC in Alabama, Robert Pasquill’s book is where you need to start and it may indeed contain everything you need, but in the event you’re still looking, here are some links to other sites with information on the CCC in Alabama:

Click here for a history of CCC work in Dekalb County, Alabama.

For a look at the U.S. Forest Service history of CCC work in Region 8, which included Alabama, click here.

Image Credits: State Map is an edited detail from Cohen's The Tree Army. The photo is also from Cohen and is a view of the recreation room of Camp P-60, home to Veteran's Company 2420, Chatom, Alabama.

Next stop on the State-By-State tour: (The Territory of) Alaska.