In the midst of the calamitous Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” poured forth new programs designed to put people back to work. One of the most fondly-remembered New Deal programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps.
While some companies (as the local units were called) were reserved for Great War veterans, most C.C.C.’s were older male teens who did a year’s service (usually not in their home states), simultaneously getting training. They were clothed, bedded, boarded, and paid, but most of the money went to their parents, who thus had more income and fewer expenses. In addition to that it removed the boys from the job market for a year, making job-seeking just a little bit easier for the unemployed. Photos show that the local contingents were racially integrated, but that wasn’t the case everywhere. (There was a smaller similar program for women, jokingly called the she-she-she, but I don’t believe it operated in our area.)
The main C.C.C. camp for Steuben County was in Kanona, with a “side camp” at Painted Post and temporary camps when and where useful. (The Kanona facility later became a P.O.W. camp in World War II, and then a seasonal camp for migrant farm workers.)
A company of C.C.C. spent the better part of a year camped near Addison with the idea of putting a dam across the Tuscarora Creek, but it was finally decided that the ground was unsuitable. C.C.C. also built a camp for men coming in to construct the Arkport Dam.
Schuyler County had Triple-C camps in Watkins Glen (later Hidden Valley 4-H camp) and Burdett. Their legacy includes a lot of the work in the state park – buildings, trails, stonework, bridges (including the Sentry Bridge near the entrance to the Gorge Trail), and more.
C.C.C. and W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration) also did quite a lot of development in Stony Brook State Park, though with the passage of time it’s hard to tell which group did what. Much of the older park infrastructure, including the two Rim Trails, comes from this period.
In the Ithaca area, according to the Ithaca Journal, C.C.C. fellows were “trucked to work sites in Enfield Glen (later Robert H. Treman), Buttermilk Falls, and Taughannock Falls State Parks. There they excavated flagstone and did masonry work, blasted, excavated fill, graded, planted trees, shrubs and grass, built roads, bridges, and water systems, erected park buildings, and – after the disastrous floods of July 1935 and August 1937 – repaired damaged facilities that in many cases they had only recently completed.” The Gorge Trail at Treman comes from this work.
C.C.C. also completed major development at Allegany State Park near Salamanca. Sections of the Finger Lakes Trail and North Country Trail were originally created by the C.C.C.
Many of the state parks had been designated, if not fully executed, by Robert Moses back in the early 1920s. What we now call Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, in marshes at the north end of Cayuga Lake, got its start in 1937. C.C.C. established a camp at Montezuma and performed much of the earliest work, including creating low dikes to restore the historic marsh area.
And that ain’t all – as we’ll see next week! In addition to all the work manifestly done, C.C.C. played an indirect role in the winning of World War II, and that will also be part of next week’s story.