West Virginia State

CCC Museum Association

On the heels of the "Roaring Twenties" and following the market crash of 1929, the Great Depression engulfed America and flowed unchecked across our Land.  Economic hard times were everywhere.  Many Americans became homeless.  Families were split up; forced to live apart.  Children became orphans.  There was little gainful employment.  To help ease the unemployment situation, one of the first things President Franklin Roosevelt did in office, was to establish the Civilian Conservation Corp, the CCC.  He did this with a stroke of a pen on March 31, 1933.

The purpose of this CCC program was to put unemployed young men to work in useful, needed conservation projects around the country.  The plan was swiftly put in motion.  Within 3 months, over 275,000 enrollees and supervisors were signed up across the nation and began work on critical conservation projects planned by foresters, or, as the case might have been, park service rangers, soil conservationists and extension educators.  

In the 9 years from 1933 until the CCC program phase-out in 1942, there were over 3 million enrollees and more than 1,600 camps throughout the country.  Many CCC projects included fire-fighting, tree-planting, road-building, development of parks, forests and erosion control of farm land...Conservation projects quite evident, as we travel the land, today.  The good works of the CCC in one state could be mirrored by the many achievements of the CCC in any state. 

The late U.S. Senator Jennings Randolph...in Congress when it all began and a tireless supporter of the CCC concept...said in 1983: "That program helped lift America out of the darkness of Depression and into the sunshine of better times."

The book Written on the Land takes a close look at what the CCC program did for West Virginia and what legacies her "Boys" left...on the landscape; lasting conservation hallmarks written on the land. 

The first call for mobilization of the Civilian Conservation Corps came in the neighboring state of Virginia on April 17, 1933 when Camp Roosevelt was established.  Soon, there were CCC camps in every state.  In West Virginia, the earliest camps were activated on May 20, 1933 in Tucker and Randolph Counties.  Altogether, there were 67 CCC camps and 55,000 enrollees who served in the Mountain State over the nine year span of the CCC program.