Three million young men, thirty dollars a month, and nine years of work you still walk on. How the Civilian Conservation Corps built the American outdoors between 1933 and 1942.
A New Deal work relief program that ran from 1933 to 1942, employing unmarried young men on conservation projects on federal, state, and local public land. Roughly three million people passed through it.
Thirty dollars a month, of which twenty-five had to be sent home to their families. Food, lodging, clothing, and medical care were provided at camp.
Trails, campgrounds, picnic shelters, park lodges and administrative buildings, scenic roads and overlooks, bridges, dams, fire lookout towers, and truck trails. It planted more than three billion trees and helped establish 711 new state parks.
Congress wound it down in 1942. The draft and wartime industry had absorbed the young men it was designed to employ, so the case for work relief disappeared almost overnight.
Yes. Camps were racially segregated under the program's administration, Black enrollment was restricted, and women were excluded from the corps entirely.
Camp Roosevelt, opened 17 April 1933 in the George Washington National Forest near Edinburg, Virginia.
