CCC boys constructing a fence, from Library of Congress at loc.gov.

Big Ridge State Park in Tennessee is a 3,687 acre wooded vacation spot with cycling, hiking trails, boating, camp grounds, and historic sites. Its creation (completed in 1937) was a collaboration amongst the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Parks Service, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of FDR’s New Deal programs in which young men from around the country were recruited in order to help create what is now the National Trail and Park systems of the United States, as well as help to recover and restore land that had been over farmed. In exchange for their work these young men received a few dollars a month, three square meals, clothing, and housing, which at the time of the Great Depression was quite an appealing way of life. The CCC had far-reaching implications for the United States, not only in the form of the still beloved National Parks, but in the generation it helped to foster and the impact these men had.

To learn more about the CCC and its relevance to today, watch PBS’s “American Experience: The Civilian Conservation Corps”:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/ccc/

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.