A wooded bluff in Illinois. A crew of young men in army-surplus work clothes, axes on their shoulders. And behind them, rising out of the ground, the stone walls and timber frame of a lodge they had cleared the land for themselves. On the 31st of March 1933, Congress passed the law that would let America build 800 state parks with an army of young men and axes.

On that day, the army did not exist. The order was a quarter of a million of them—off city blocks and worn-out farms, into camps in the woods by the 1st of July. That gave them three months. They made it, and the records show how close it came to not happening.

Two men carry this story. One is a 17-year-old farm boy from Bumpass, Virginia, who was too young to get in and got in anyway. The other is a Tennessee sergeant who came home from the First World War with the Medal of Honor and ended up in charge of a crew of these boys building a stone dam on the Cumberland Plateau. Between the two of them sits the question this whole story turns on: How do you take that many young men with little schooling, no trade, and no work, get them into the woods inside three months, and end up with roads, dams, and lodges that people are still using ninety years later?

The first week of April 1933, the first enrollee was signed up. Ten days after that, on the 17th of April, about 200 young men arrived in the George Washington National Forest near Luray, Virginia, at a place the army had named Camp Roosevelt. It was the first camp in the whole program. On paper, it was National Forest Camp Number One.

And it came with a problem anybody in Washington could see. One camp of 200 men was open. There were 75 days left until the 1st of July. A quarter of a million men at 200 to a camp works out to 1,250 camps.

Every one of those camps needed a site, a water supply, a kitchen, beds, tools, an officer, and a train to bring the men in. On the 17th of April, 1,249 of them did not exist. The rules for who could get in tell you why nobody could let that count slip. A young man had to be single, between 18 and 25, and out of work.

He got $30 a month, but 25 of those dollars never touched his hands. They went home by government check to his family. One enrollee in Oregon remembered getting $5 while his mother got a check for $25 in the mail at home. Another said it more simply: his mother needed every cent.

A third had two years of high school left, watched his folks struggle to pay for the place they lived in, and decided he might as well go make a dollar a day. So every boy the army got into a camp was also a kitchen table somewhere—in a city tenement or on a dried-out farm—with grocery money coming in. In a lot of houses, it was the bigger reason for the whole thing. That changes what a deadline means.

Every week the count ran late was a week of checks that didn’t get mailed. Finding the men was never going to be the hard part. Hundreds of thousands signed up within weeks. Getting them examined, clothed, fed, and moved into working camps in the woods by the deadline was a different matter.

And the count did run late. By the 10th of May, the Park Service’s own history of the program says a crisis point had been reached. Five weeks in, the numbers were behind the calendar, and the work was split between the Labor Department, the Army, and the departments that ran the forests and the parks. Two days later, on the 12th of May, the president approved a plan that gave the people running the mobilization more room to act.

What happened after that was mostly the Army’s doing. The system had three parts, and each one did a job the other two couldn’t. The Labor Department did the choosing through the United States Employment Service, picking young men whose families needed that check. The Army did everything that involved a body.

It gave every recruit a physical. It held him at an army post for up to a few weeks of conditioning. It clothed him, often in leftover uniforms from the First World War. And it moved him by train to the woods.

It even looked after his teeth—enrollees got free medical and dental care on top of the wage. The Army’s side of the deal showed up first at the table. Camp Zigzag on Mount Hood in Oregon opened on the 11th of May, one of the earliest camps in the country. One of its enrollees never forgot walking into the mess hall on his first day and seeing tables loaded with meat and potatoes and big bowls of gravy.

He and his brother didn’t stop eating for a long time. The National Archives account of that first summer says the new men put on about twelve pounds apiece in their first two months. Boys who had come in underfed were getting three meals a day, with hot lunches trucked out to them on the job. The rest of the Army’s side showed up at six in the morning.

At one Oregon camp, there wasn’t even a bugle. Reveille came off a record player, and then an officer walked the barracks checking that every bunk was made with hospital corners. One of those Oregon boys said later there was no marching and no real military work, but the whole place had a military flavor to it. In the woods, an army officer ran each camp.

He ran the mess hall, the barracks, the flag in the morning, and the bed check at night. What the officer did not run was the work. The minute a crew walked out past the edge of camp in the morning, it belonged to somebody else—a project superintendent from one of the agencies that owned the land, with a local woodsman working under him as foreman. In a national forest, that was the Forest Service.

In a state park, it was the National Park Service, which put a Park Service man named Conrad Wirth in charge of a whole state park program. By the end of that first enrollment period in September, 105 camps had been sent to state park work in 26 states. The Park Service had the plans—a road here, a trail there, a shelter, a water line, a dam across a creek. What it did not have was anybody in those camps who knew how to build any of it.

That’s where the third kind of man came in. On the 22nd of April, barely two weeks into the program, the rules were changed so the camps could hire men from the country around them. They were called local experienced men, and the boys shortened that to LEMs. For them, the age limit and the rule about being single were thrown out.

They were woodsmen and tradesmen who already knew the ground, and by that summer there were tens of thousands of them spread through the camps. The enrollees remembered them as stern and as good to them. One man from an Oregon camp described how it went. They showed you the tools.

They told you how to use them and how to work together. And then they told you to go follow the snags. He said you couldn’t believe where some of those trees came down while the boys were still learning. That was the whole training program—standing in the woods next to a man who already knew how.

If you’ve ever watched an old sawmill run, the CCC worked a lot like one. The Army was the log deck and the carriage, taking raw timber off the train and feeding it in, a company of 200 at a time. The woodsmen were the saw. The Park Service drawings were the pattern every board had to come out matching.

None of the three could have built a park alone. Together, they could turn a boy who’d never held a crosscut saw into half of a sawing team in a single summer. And the calendar held. On the 1st of July 1933, the count was in.

More than a quarter of a million young men were at work in more than 1,300 camps. Add in the 28,000 war veterans, the 14,000 Native Americans enrolled for work on the reservations, and the woodsmen, and the total went past 300,000. From the day the bill passed, it had taken 92 days. CCC Legacy, the group that keeps the program’s history, calls it the most rapid peacetime mobilization in American history.

The Michigan Historical Center’s account says it moved men faster than the country did when it went to war in 1917. But a camp full of young men is not a park. In July of 1933, most of them had been in the woods for a few weeks, and the Park Service was about to hand them dynamite, stone, and canyon walls. To see what that looked like from the inside, you have to go to a tobacco farm in Virginia.

Ashton Burris was born in Bumpass, Virginia, a little place close to the C&O mainline about halfway between Richmond and Charlottesville. His father farmed and raised a little tobacco for cash, and there were 12 children in that house, nine of them boys. Burris went to a one-room school on a country road. The first paid work he ever did was for somebody else’s farm—ten hours for 50 cents, and he brought his own lunch.

He was about 13 when the drought of 1930 hit Virginia. He remembered it all his life. His family got through on the corn they had managed to raise, feeding the stock with it, and trading eggs for sugar and coffee. Then the Depression kept going, year after year.

His older brother John went into the CCC first, to one of the camps up on the Blue Ridge. Word got around the way it did then—from a friend of their father’s, from a boy a mile or two down the road who’d gotten in. “I was just anxious to get in myself,” Burris said. The trouble was his age.

In 1934, he was 17 and the rule said 18. Sixty-four years later, at a reunion of the old enrollees, he explained how he got past it. He was strong, he said, and he figured he could fool them. “I told them a story and I got in.

”

After that, the Army took over. A recruiting station in Richmond, then Fort Monroe down on the Chesapeake, where he stayed about ten days and went through the big examination—a doctor checking every boy for anything that would send him home. Then a train, about a dozen coaches long. That train was the Army’s sawmill carriage in motion.

It dropped coaches off as it went. “Here and yonder,” as Burris put it—a car of boys left at one stop and another car at the next, each one bound for a different camp. Nobody got off without being told where he was going. An Army sergeant came through and called out the name of their camp, and then he added a nickname for the place that Burris could still repeat, word for word, when he was an old man.

“Camp Roosevelt,” the sergeant shouted. “The Garden of Eden. ”

It was the very first camp, the one that had opened in the spring of 1933. And some of the boys complained when they saw it that the Army had brought them right back into the brush.

They got off the train at Edinburg and a truck carried them about eight miles up to the camp. It was October. The barracks were already standing by then, and a forest ranger gave the new men a little talk. Most of the boys were southern, a lot of them from southwest Virginia, with a few from Pennsylvania later on.

At more than 80 years old, Burris told the interviewer he couldn’t remember what had happened that morning, but he could remember the name of his company captain—Paul Tucker. His first job was cutting the right-of-way for a road. An engineer had staked out a line along the ridge from the camp out to Route 211, where you can stand and look across to New Market, and Burris’s crew felled every tree in a strip wide enough to carry it. They had one bulldozer and one big Caterpillar tractor, and later a second dozer.

The rest was axes, saws, and dynamite for the stumps. “We lived on the army rule,” he said. “And I liked the army rule. ” The older men in the barracks—ex-Marines and Army men in their mid-20s—showed him how to get by.

The rule, as Burris remembered it, was about six hours of work a day. Lunch either went out with them or came up to the job on a chow truck. Then back to camp in time to wash up, stand for the flag, and line up for supper. After supper, there was a recreation hall, and later a big radio in it, and softball, and an education adviser trying to get the boys into classes.

Burris tried the mechanics class a little and admitted it didn’t take. On certain nights, if you signed up, an Army truck ran into Luray or New Market or Woodstock. And in 1934, that meant talking to girls and drinking 3. 2 beer.

A state park was a harder kind of job than a forest road, because it had to be built for strangers who would drive in with their families for decades. And one of the hardest of those assignments was waiting at the edge of a canyon in the Texas Panhandle. Palo Duro Canyon is cut into the flat Panhandle plains near Amarillo, Texas. In 1933, through what the state’s historians describe as an elaborate system of leases, more than 15,000 acres of it were signed over to the Texas State Parks Board.

The board now owned a canyon with no way into it. The floor was down there. The visitors would be standing up on the rim. The first CCC companies sent out to close that gap were not boys at all.

They were companies of First World War veterans. The veterans had camps of their own inside the Corps, and the rules that kept out married men and older men did not apply to them. So these companies were full of grown men. Their job was the road—Park Road 5, a two-lane road from the rim to the canyon floor.

The Texas State Historical Association’s handbook puts its drop at 800 feet in a little over a mile. 800 feet is roughly the height of a 60-story building. Now imagine taking a road down the side of that building in turns wide enough for two cars to pass each other. That’s the job the veterans started on in their first summer, and they were only the first shift.

Over about four and a half years, seven companies of the CCC worked that canyon. Four were companies of veterans. One was a junior company of young men, Company 894. Two were companies of Black enrollees, Companies 2875 and 2876, in a Corps whose camps had all been segregated by the summer of 1935—and their labor was in that canyon as surely as anyone’s.

The park opened to the public in 1934, before the work was done, and the crews kept building around the visitors. Up on the rim they put up stone cabins. Down on the floor, four small cabins known as Cow Camp. Along the road they laid stone bridges and culverts, and they built a lodge—El Coronado, named in honor of the Spanish explorer Coronado.

The last company pulled out of Palo Duro in December of 1937. The Parks Board had a canyon and no road into it. The federal government had men and nothing for them to build. The road down that wall is where those two needs met.

A road, even one down a canyon, is mostly cutting, hauling, and grading. A big building in stone adds a harder problem, because it has to hold its weight for a hundred years, and somebody has to figure out what a chimney does to the ground underneath it. Pere Marquette State Park sits on the wooded bluffs above the Illinois River, just outside Grafton, Illinois, close to where the Illinois runs into the Mississippi. The CCC worked on its lodge from 1933 to 1939.

The stone came out of the Grafton Rock quarry, a limestone that went into the cabins, into the lodge floor, and into the great-room fireplace. That fireplace weighs 700 tons. 700 tons is hard to picture. Here’s one way to see it.

Take a whole CCC company, all 200 boys, and figure 150 pounds a boy. Put all of them on one side of a giant scale. To balance that single fireplace, you would need about 45 more companies standing up there with them. And the crews who raised it were enrollees who a year or two earlier had not been able to find work of any kind.

The frame of the lodge is timber, and not ordinary timber. The poles run as much as three feet across—Douglas fir and western cypress and pecky cypress logs that no single man could have shifted on his own. And then there’s the part people walk past without noticing. The metal work in that lodge—the chandeliers, the door handles, the window locks—was made by the CCC, too.

Boys who came in to swing axes left behind hardware. The furniture came from another kind of labor entirely: inmates in Illinois built it. The lodge opened for business in 1940, and its own history puts the bill at $352,912. Six years for one building sounds slow until you remember how the Corps worked.

A boy enrolled for six months at a time. He could sign up again, but sooner or later he went home. So the boys who set the first stones of that fireplace were probably not the boys who set the last ones. The fireplace went up under one crew after another.

That was one lodge in Illinois. In Virginia, the Park Service set itself a very different kind of target: six parks opened on the same morning. Douthat State Park is in the Allegheny Mountains near Clifton Forge, straddling Bath and Alleghany counties. A group of businessmen headed by Robert Douthat donated the first 1,920 acres, and on the 15th of June 1933, CCC crews started work.

Three companies divided it up. Company 1836 did the forestry and cut the trails. Company 1374 built the park office, the shelters, the beach building, and the first 25 cabins. And Company 1373 built a dam and a spillway across Wilson Creek, and made a lake of about 50 acres where a mountain creek had been running.

About 600 CCC men went through Douthat in the years the camps were there. That’s enough men to fill a small town, and the first of them were working toward a single date. That date came on the 15th of June 1936—three years to the day after the first crew went to work. Douthat opened to the public, and it didn’t open alone.

That same day, Virginia opened Westmoreland, Hungry Mother, Fairy Stone, Staunton River, and Seashore—the one they call First Landing now. Six state parks on a single morning. A whole state park system in one day. It was the first time any state had done that, and CCC crews had built all six.

Picture that morning: six parks spread from the Atlantic shore to the mountains of the Southwest, all opening on the same Monday in June, three years to the day. Whether somebody in Richmond planned it that way or it just fell out like that, the crews made the date. And the count kept climbing the whole time. In 1935, the age limits were widened to 17 through 28, which means that a year after Burris lied his way into Camp Roosevelt, a boy his age wouldn’t have needed the story.

By the end of August that year, the Corps hit its peak—a little over half a million men in somewhere between 2,600 and 2,900 camps. The army that did not exist in March of 1933 was now several times the size of the regular army. But the calendar in the woods had more on it than opening days. Every summer, it also had fire season.

By then, the CCC had become something nobody wrote into that law in March of 1933. It had become the country’s fire crew. In that first summer of 1933, when a logging fire in Gales Creek Canyon near Forest Grove, Oregon, blew up into what became the Tillamook, there were two or three CCC camps working the fire lines within a day. That fire scorched millions of trees.

In the years after, another fire raced right through the town of Bandon on the coast. The boys who had come to plant trees and build trails became the first crews called out when the forests burned. After that, every fire season, they got the call. One Oregon enrollee remembered the lights snapping on just after he got to bed.

A bus ride all the way down the coast to a fire at Brookings. Then another bus up toward the Canadian border to the next one. “1939,” one of them said, “was a terrible year for fires. You just kept going.

” Another of them said, “Until you practically fell over. ”

So in the summer of 1937, when smoke went up in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, it was the CCC that went up the mountain after it. On Wednesday, the 18th of August, lightning hit the pine timber along Blackwater Creek, about 35 miles west of Cody, Wyoming. Nobody saw it.

The fire smoldered and crept along the forest floor for two days before the owners of a hunting camp spotted the smoke. When it was found on the 20th, it covered about two acres and a half. Seven enrollees from the CCC camp at Wapiti, Company 1852, were sent out that afternoon to start scraping a fire line around it on the Blackwater. The crews were mostly CCC boys, and the men leading them were more experienced Forest Service fire managers.

By half past three that afternoon, 70 enrollees and rangers from the Wapiti camp were on the move toward it. About 50 more came from the CCC camp at Ten Sleep in the Bighorn National Forest, and they reached the fire around 11 on the morning of the 21st. By afternoon, it was 90 degrees on that mountain, and the relative humidity was 6 percent. At 3 on the 21st, a dry weather front moved in, and the wind blew steady out of the southwest at 30 miles an hour.

Fifteen minutes later, it swung around to the west all at once, with gusts up to 45. A spot fire that nobody had found yet was already burning. The wind shift drove the fire up into the crowns of the pines and threw it over the lines the crews had been digging since the day before. Ranger Alfred Clayton had a crew of eight men, himself included.

They were trapped near a dam they had built. Clayton was 45 years old. He and six of his men died on the mountain, and the eighth died later in the hospital. The whole crew was lost.

Ranger Urban Post had about 40 men. When the fire came over the ridge at them, he got them onto a rocky outcrop and had them lie flat. For about three hours, they moved around on that rock, shifting away from each wave of heat as it rolled over them. Bob Johnson was an 18-year-old enrollee on that fire.

Years later, he remembered being able to hear men somewhere below them and not being able to get down to help. “It was a terrible thing,” he said. Eighteen years old, on a burning mountain in Wyoming, listening. Post kept his crew on that rock until the smoke thinned enough for them to walk off it.

And only then could anybody on that mountain begin to find out who had made it through. Most of Post’s men made it off. Seven men from his unit had not. And with Clayton’s crew, 15 firefighters died on the Blackwater Fire—most of them CCC enrollees.

Thirty-eight more were burned, many of them badly. Two men who came off that mountain alive, Roy Bevans and Ambrocio Garza, died later of their injuries. The Wyoming State History of the fire records that Bevans had said how lucky he was to be alive. By the time it was controlled, four days after it was found, the fire had taken 1,700 acres of old timber.

The investigation that followed changed how the country fights fire in the mountains. One of the investigators, David Godwin, put money into experiments with dropping firefighters by parachute, so a crew could reach a fire in remote country while it was still a couple of acres. By 1939, the Forest Service had a smokejumper program tested at Winthrop, Washington, and at two sites in Montana. After the Blackwater, a fire in country like that could be reached from the air.

While the Corps was learning what fire could do, one of its crews was hard at work on a plateau in Tennessee, under a superintendent whose name most of the country already knew. Alvin York was born in 1887 in Pall Mall, up in Fentress County, Tennessee. On the 8th of October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France, he fought in the action that earned him the Medal of Honor, and he came home a Tennessee hero of the First World War. By 1935, he was 47 years old, and he took a job with the CCC as a project superintendent.

His project was a dam across Byrd Creek near the town of Crossville, on top of the plateau. The land around it was meant to be the outdoor ground for the Cumberland Homesteads, a big federal homestead project going up on the plateau at the same time, and the lake behind York’s Dam was meant to be its centerpiece. The crew was Company 3464, working under the direction of the National Park Service. They started on the dam in 1935, and it took them until 1938 to finish it.

Three years for one dam. To see why, you have to look at what they were building, because it was two things at once. The same structure that holds back the water carries a road across the top of it. It’s a dam and a bridge in one, stretched more than 300 feet across the creek—longer than a football field from goal line to goal line.

It stands 28 feet tall, about the height of a three-story house. Water goes over it through a row of seven arched spillways. The stone on the outside is Crab Orchard stone, a sandstone that comes out of the ground right there on the Cumberland Plateau. But the part you can’t see is the part that tells you how these boys really worked.

Inside that stone face is a core of concrete. And a big dam needs a lot of the crushed rock that goes into concrete. So they made their own. According to the park’s friends group, the enrollees crushed the local sandstone themselves—partly by hand with hammers, and partly with a hammer mill run off the motor from a 1918 Pierce-Arrow.

Stop and think about that for a second. They had no gravel supplier, so they turned themselves into one—with hammers and a mill driven by a car engine that was already 17 years old when the dam was started. Nobody was handing that crew money for equipment. It took what the plateau gave it and figured out the rest.

That’s the second half of the answer to how parks all over the country got built by people who weren’t builders. The CCC usually gets remembered as the tree army—boys planting seedlings in rows. And it was that. But the parks show a Corps that turned itself into a building crew and built with what was under its feet.

The stone for the lodge at Grafton came out of the Grafton quarry. The stone for Byrd Creek came off that same plateau. It’s why a building like that Illinois lodge looks as if it grew out of the bluff it stands on. The dam was finished in 1938.

By the account of the Tennessee Encyclopedia and of the park’s friends group, it is the largest masonry structure the CCC ever built anywhere in the country. And that same year, the federal government deeded 1,427 acres around it—a little over two square miles—to the state of Tennessee. Cumberland Mountain State Park was born. Today it covers 1,720 acres.

The crews didn’t stop when the dam was done. Company 3464, with Company 1471 working alongside it, stayed on until 1941, building trails, picnic areas, cabins, a boathouse and a bathhouse. They built a stone water tank and a pump house, and down near the dam, a building to house a gristmill. York stayed with the park as its superintendent.

Then in 1940, the year the park officially opened, he resigned. Hollywood was making a movie about his life—the one called Sergeant York—and he left the plateau to advise on the filming. It’s one of the stranger turns in this whole story. The man had been famous since one morning in France in 1918, and he spent five of the years after it on a Tennessee creek, running a crew of Depression boys building a stone dam.

Then he left to help the filmmakers tell his own war. Meanwhile, the kind of boy coming into the camps kept changing with the rules. In 1937, the age limits moved again, to 17 through 23. That winter, a boy named Clinton Dean came into a camp at South River, up in Shenandoah National Park, with Company 1387.

He was 16 and had finished the sixth grade. When the interviewer asked if he’d fudged his age, he nodded. He hadn’t exactly volunteered, either. He’d been “a little unruly,” as he put it, and a judge suggested that rather than come back before him anytime in the next two years, he might spend those two years in the CCC.

Dean cut dead chestnut trees, built fire trails, fought fires, drove a dump truck, and trained for fire tower duty. He boxed in the camp—in a lot of camps, a pair of big soft gloves and three short rounds was how an argument got settled. He still remembered a traveling strong man who came through, billed as Captain Bob Anderson, “the strongest little man in the world. ” He remembered snow 12 to 15 inches deep on the mountain in winter.

And for a boy who’d stopped at the sixth grade, the camps offered night courses. Every camp had classes. You could take as many as you wanted, and enrollees could finish high school or learn to read and write. On weekends, he often walked home six miles down off the ridge to Greene County.

He remembered the camp’s recreation leader, a Mr. Graham, as a man whose fitness impressed him. A judge sent him up that mountain as a kind of sentence. Fifty-eight years later, back in the park for an interview, he said he wished young people still had something like it.

By the time York left the plateau, the calendar was running out on the whole Corps. And the clearest way to watch it run out is through one more boy. John Cochan was 16 when he joined, from a family in Pennsylvania. Years later, he still had the date down cold: 10/27/1941.

He joined out of necessity—his word for it. His parents didn’t have the income to support themselves and him and the rest of the family. He’d heard about the camps by word of mouth, from older men who had gone in back in 1933, and he called himself the last one to get into the CCC. He didn’t move with a company.

He went from camp to camp on his own, and everywhere he was sent, he was the only one sent. First Cedar Run, Pennsylvania, Camp S-90, doing forestry work—cutting fire trails and clearing deadwood out of the woods. Then Camp S-95 at Leaport, Pennsylvania. Then Goldsboro, Pennsylvania, where the CCC boys were building firing ranges at an army base.

Six weeks after he signed up, on the 7th of December 1941, he was in camp when the news came that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. And from that morning on, the whole program was living on borrowed time. The country needed its young men for the war now, and the money that had built the lodges and the dams was about to go somewhere else. Cochan was sent across the country to Idaho, to Priest Lake near the Canadian border—clearing blister rust from the trees and felling timber for the lumber company.

His crew leader was a forest ranger building log booms on Priest Lake to catch the logs as they floated down to the mills. He remembered being told the Idaho work was preparation for building a highway up through Canada to Alaska. For him and his crew, it never happened. The war got there first.

In 1942, Congress stopped paying for the Civilian Conservation Corps. The president had wanted to make the Corps permanent, but enrollment had been falling since Pearl Harbor, and the camps were being emptied and torn down. Look at the date the Corps operations formally ended: the 30th of June 1942. Go back to how this story started.

A law passed on the 31st of March 1933, with a promise that had to be kept by the 1st of July. Nine years later, the program it created was shut down one day short of another 1st of July. It was born racing that date, and it ended right up against it. Cochan got his discharge through the Army, at the depot in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania.

Because by then, as he put it, the CCC had been abolished and the Army took total control of it. That was how the Corps ended for its last boys—with paperwork at an army depot and a war waiting outside the gate. Asked years later whether it had been worth it, Cochan said definitely. And the reason he gave wasn’t the forestry.

In his camps there were Jewish boys, Irish, Italian, and German boys, all thrown in together. He said he learned to get along with people from every walk of life, and never unlearned it. Now count what went out that gate over those nine years. About three million young men passed through the CCC.

Some left early—the National Archives account of the first summer says about one in ten dropped out before it ended. By CCC Legacy’s count, they served in about 4,500 camps, in every state and in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Oregon’s camps alone saw about 87,000 boys. Close to 3,000 of the men who served in Oregon were American Indians, in camps that worked on the reservations.

They planted somewhere between two and three billion trees, depending on whose tally you trust—which is where that “tree army” name came from. And a billion trees is not an abstraction when you hear how they went in. One Oregon enrollee described it: the crew formed a line and went straight up over the hills, over the logs and the stumps, about ten feet from one tree to the next. They had 400 trees to get in.

And when those were planted, they went back to camp. They built more than 40,000 bridges. By the same count, they put up 3,470 fire lookout towers. Across the country, the Corps developed about 800 state parks—building the roads, cabins, lodges, dams, and trails that turned land on a map into a park people could use.

And the Park Service’s share of all this was never only state parks. It ran CCC work in city and county parks, too, and in the national parks. Every one of those numbers is a crew of boys with axes, shovels, and a man from the next county showing them how. When the war came, the camps turned out to have been a kind of preparation for it.

One Oregon man put it plainly years later: when he got into the military, he said, he knew more about what he was going to be doing than the men who had never been through a camp. The discipline was already in them. Another said the camps taught him early that he could handle anything that came along. And a third said the boys who came in went out as men.

And some of them just went to work. Burris, the farm boy who lied about his age to get into Camp Roosevelt, served his two-year hitch and then went west into West Virginia. He worked for a contractor until he got a job in the coal mines around Beckley. To get that first job, he gave a friend $25 to take him in—the same amount the government had once mailed home for him every month.

His first coal, he said, he loaded for 39 cents a ton. He stayed in the mines for 33 years. Burris is the part of the ledger that never makes it into the totals, and so is every man like him. But the roads, lodges, and dams they built did not go into the mines or the war with them.

They stayed where they were put, and you can still drive from one end of this story to the other. The drive starts in the Shenandoah Valley. Start at Edinburg, Virginia, and head up into the George Washington National Forest, to the site of Camp Roosevelt—the camp the sergeant called the Garden of Eden. It ran from the spring of 1933 until 1942.

Its crews strung telephone lines, built roads and bridges, planted trees, stocked streams, and fought fires. It started with four barracks of 48 men each. By the end, it had grown to 24 buildings, with six barracks, a mess hall, an infirmary, a garage, a recreation hall, and an education building. If your grandfather or a great-uncle served in one of these camps, his enrollee file is held today at the National Archives at St.

Louis, Missouri, where those files are being scanned into the Archives’ online catalog. Before you leave the valley, go up to Luray and onto Skyline Drive into Shenandoah National Park. The old enrollees of the Shenandoah chapter held reunions up there for decades, at Skyland. And that is where Burris and Cochan sat down with the park’s volunteers to record their stories.

Cochan, near the end of his, apologized for going on about his CCC days, and then said that if it was rude, he was guilty of it. Down at the south end of the park, near South River, is where Dean’s camp stood. When he went back in 1995, the camp was gone, but the pavement of the old company street was still there—and he said it still looked good. From there, go south down the valley and over into the Alleghenies, to Clifton Forge and into Douthat, which has grown to more than 4,500 acres.

The lake that Company 1373 made out of Wilson Creek is still there, and so is the park they opened on that June morning in 1936. In 1986, the whole park was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register, and three months after that, to the National Register of Historic Places. Then drive west into Tennessee and climb up onto the Cumberland Plateau to Crossville. The park sits just south of town.

You can drive across York’s Dam, because the road still runs over the top of it—with the lake on one side and the creek on the other. The bathhouse the crews built is still standing, and so are the stone water tank, the pump house, and the stone drinking fountains. The old gristmill building down by the dam goes by the name Millhouse. Now from Crossville, it’s a long day northwest, to the Mississippi, to Grafton, Illinois, and up the bluff to Pere Marquette.

The lodge still takes overnight guests, and the great room with that fireplace is still the heart of the building. Then it’s the long haul southwest, across Missouri and Oklahoma, into the Texas Panhandle, to the town of Canyon and 12 miles east of it on State Highway 217. The park is about 28,000 acres now—close to twice what the Parks Board got in 1933. You still go down into the canyon on Park Road 5, the veterans’ road from the rim to the floor.

And El Coronado Lodge is the park’s visitor center, which means the front door of Palo Duro is a building the CCC put up. The three stone cabins on the rim and the four Cow Camp cabins down on the floor are still there, too, and they are still overnight cabins. The next stop is a long way north. Go up out of Texas, all the way to Cody, Wyoming, and then west on US 14, 16, and 20—the road toward Yellowstone.

Along that highway stands a memorial to the men who died on the Blackwater Fire. On the second anniversary of the fire, 500 local people turned out to dedicate a stone monument 71 feet long. Up in the forest, at the end of a 12-mile round trip you can only make on foot or on horseback, there are two smaller monuments. The CCC crews built those themselves, in 1938, for their own.

And if you want to finish where the fires started for the Corps, keep going west to Oregon. At Silver Falls State Park—newly created when the Corps arrived—the CCC worked on 88 different projects. And on Mount Hood, the ranger station complex at Zigzag, built in the CCC years, was still in use 75 years later. Two old Zigzag enrollees who went back to it remembered putting a new roof on the upper end of the first ski lift on the mountain.

Zigzag was one of the first camps in the country to open—the place where two brothers sat down to that first meal of meat and potatoes—and it was one of the last to close. The law passed on that March day never mentioned a canyon road, a fireplace on a bluff, or a stone dam on a plateau. On that day, not one of the young men who would build them had been found yet. There was a deadline and an empty calendar.

By that summer, they were in the woods. Picture that bluff in Illinois a few years on—the stone walls up to the roofline, and a woodsman showing a crew of city and farm boys where the next log goes. The camps are gone now, and nearly all of the men are gone with them. The lodge they raised is still standing on that bluff, long after the last of them put down his axe.

In 1942, the Army took on the road to Alaska that Cochan never got to build. That story is how America cut 1,700 miles of highway through wilderness in eight months.