Joseph M. Speakman | The New Deal Arrives in Penn's Woods: The Beginnings of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Pennsylvania | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2

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Joseph M. Speakman | The New Deal Arrives in Penn's Woods: The Beginnings of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Pennsylvania | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2 | The History Cooperative

The New Deal Arrives in Penn's Woods: The Beginnings of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Pennsylvania

"It was a dark and stormy night." The opening of Snoopy's abortive novel works well as a description of the beginnings of many Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in Pennsylvania in the late spring of 1933. On one such night, May 6, a company of two hundred Philadelphia men labored in a heavy rain setting up tents for their new home in the woods, Camp S-54, at Cowan's Gap. Another group of men from Philadelphia, arriving in Hillsgrove in early May, had to cut down trees before trucks could deliver their tents to Camp S-96. Their first week was so rainy that the company had to buy dry firewood from local farmers in order to cook. Further west, a train carrying another company of CCC enrollees pulled into Philipsburg in the late afternoon of May 30. State foresters provided trucks to deliver the men to a wet field in the Moshannon State Forest, the site of Camp S-71. In a heavy downpour the men set to work clearing tree stumps and brush before they could put up a mess tent and enjoy a light meal. They then erected the army tents in which they spent a damp first night in the woods. A week later, on June 5, a train arrived at the Mifflinburg train station with a company of young men from various Pennsylvania towns. This company was luckier in that some local forestry workers had cleared their tent sites in advance of their arrival. But, after setting up about fifty tents, Camp S-67 was also hit with a thunderstorm and drenching rains.¹	1
Such soggy and dreary beginnings would not seem to bode well for this earliest work-relief program of the New Deal. As things turned out, however, nowhere else was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's new program received with greater enthusiasm and competency than in Penn's Woods. With the possible exception of California, no other state was as well prepared to utilize CCC labor effectively as was Pennsylvania. It had a vast amount of publicly owned forests in need of remedial work and plenty of experienced foresters to supervise that work. And the Depression, which had hit the state particularly hard, would ensure that there was plenty of labor available for conservation projects. Pennsylvania's Governor Gifford Pinchot reported that 12 percent of the nation's unemployed lived in his state and that two million Pennsylvanians received some kind of relief assistance.² When the political impact of the CCC on the state's Democratic Party is also taken into account, the Pennsylvania chapter of the CCC story is, arguably, its most important chapter.	2
The Pennsylvania CCC program, more than any other, combined features of eastern and western states. Although most eastern states had vast reservoirs of unemployed workers, much of the conservation work done by the CCC was in the more spacious National Parks and National Forests of the western states where labor was relatively scarce. Consequently, tens of thousands of men had to be transported across the country to match workers and work. Pennsylvania had an abundance of unemployed young men and ended up enrolling 184,916 of them for CCC camps, more than any state except New York. But unlike other eastern states, Pennsylvania was able to provide abundant conservation work on its own lands for the vast majority of its enrollees and ended up with 152 work camps over the nine-year life of the program, more than any state except California. Given the size of its program and the great variety of work done by Pennsylvania men, both in and out of state, there is no better microcosm in which to study the CCC than the Keystone State. And, adding interest to the story, Gifford Pinchot, one of the most important conservationists of the early twentieth century, was governor of Pennsylvania when the program was launched.	. . .

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