A Look at History
CCC Camp on Mackinac Island Changed Young Men's Lives
BY FRANK STRAUS

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many healthy young Americans were jobless. The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that the best possible policy for fighting the hard times included recruiting tens of thousands of destitute young men and enrolling them into a publicworks force to perform all sorts of tasks that improved America's infrastructure. It founded the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a temporary federal agency that opened work camps all over the United States. One such camp stood for five years on Mackinac Island. It was on British Landing Road at the Early farm, on the current site of our Island's solid waste sorting station.

With its many motor vehicle factories, Michigan was not immune from the need for CCC jobs.

The corps recruited 102,814 youths to serve in Michigan between 1933 and 1942; many of the recruits, but not all, were Michigan men. More than 80 camps were opened and closed throughout Michigan during this period. Nearby mainland camps included stations at East Jordan, Petoskey, Raco, Rogers City, and Vanderbilt.

Looking southwest toward British Landing Road. The Early homestead can be seen in the distance. (Photograph courtesy of Tom Pfeiffelmann)

The CCC time came soon after the great lumbering era that had devastated much of Michigan's northland.

The timber crews, after cutting down everything salable, had left behind great fields full of downed branches, twigs, leaves, and needles. These swathes of kindling and tinder had then usually gone up in flames, and wildlife die-offs and severe erosion of the blackened, scant topsoil of northern Michigan had finished the unhappy picture.

Many Michigan men and women of the late 1800s had hoped that the cleared, burnedover acreage would make good agricultural land, but too much of it did not. The forests the pioneers saw, filled with deer and small game, had been an example of the kind of life that lived best in these parts, and now the immense task facing Michigan was to try to rebuild these forests.

One of the foremost duties of the "CCC boys" - they were usually between 18 and 25 years of age - was to replant seedlings to replace the vanished woodlands. Many of the artificial forests so visible to drivers on northern Michigan's highways today are CCC forests, pine trees planted carefully in rows. During this 10- year period, the CCC planted an estimated 484 million trees in Michigan, approximately 100 trees for every citizen of the state!

Mackinac Island CCC Camp No. 1671 at the Early farm across from Wawashkamo Golf Course in the late 1930s. (Photograph courtesy of Tom Pfeiffelmann)

Before 1933, there was almost no infrastructure in the United States to face forest fires. The CCC became one of the first groups of men able to clear firebreaks and engage in the primitive firefighting efforts of the day. The professional firefighters of today who fight woodland blazes, such as the Sleeper Lakes fire this past summer north of Newberry, trace their ancestry back to the CCC.

The CCC also worked on national and state park design and construction. One of the crowning environmental achievements of the 1930s in Michigan was the creation of Isle Royale National Park, a wilderness island reclaimed from what had once been semiindustrial conditions. Business firms had opened copper mines on the island, set off nitroglycerin explosions, and sunk tunnels into the rock. The CCC helped clear the trails and build the lodges that welcome visitors to the national park today.

On Mackinac Island, the CCC's hand can be seen in two major projects that survive to this day. The conservation corps rebuilt Fort Holmes, on the top of the Island; the stockaded redoubt had been allowed to erode soon after its abandonment by the U.S. Army in the late 1810s. By 1933, only earthen mounds recalled the fortifications built by the British in 1813-14; an accurate plan of the fort survived in Washington, D.C., however, and in 1936, the old open-air fort was rebuilt.

The CCC's Island campers also built the Scout barracks building behind Fort Mackinac. The first groups of Boy Scouts to staff the fort, starting in 1929, had lived inside the fort itself, but State Park commissioner Roger Andrews looked forward to a time in the future when the fort would be a fully renovated historical landmark open to the public, and asked the CCC to build a separate place for the Scouts to live.

A third CCC work on Mackinac has been expanded so much that it no longer exists in its original form. This was a small airstrip cleared north of Annex Road on the west side of the Island. It was just a narrow rectangle of relatively level, open space where daring fliers could take off and land; there was no paved runway. Planes began using the new airstrip immediately after it opened in 1934, but it was not suitable for year-around use. The modern Mackinac Island airport, which replaced the airstrip in 1964-65, includes a cleared area so large that the CCC airstrip has entirely disappeared. The CCC airstrip's ghost occupies a small patch of the current airport's footprint.

A few other familiar sights on Mackinac Island were probably built by the CCC, such as the stone safety wall at Arch Rock, and a similar wall and wooden fence at Point Lookout, north of Fort Holmes that looks over Sugar Loaf and the eastern half of the island. The Point Lookout site also has an openair rain shelter. All three of these structures match the styles of work known to have been built by the CCC in other places.

The "CCC boys" worked hard. Recruits who were literally or functionally illiterate were expected to attend adult-education classes set up in the camps, and thousands did; but the vast majority of corpsmen were well-educated by the standards of the day. A typical recruit was a high school graduate who had expected to be able to find a job when he got his diploma - but because of the economic climate of the 1930s, the CCC and its minimal pay was the best opportunity available.

Millions of letters sent home from CCC camps vividly describe the lives led by the recruits. Many camps made some effort to keep the young men happy and busy, typically by setting up a screen inside a common tent and showing movies.

The CCC was not a pleasure experience, however. It was run by the U.S. Army, and recruits were expected to obey a code of discipline similar to that imposed upon infantry soldiers in those days.

Many of the CCC young men successfully found jobs in civilian life after a year or two, and left the Corps, however, the discipline imposed upon them in the 1930s would prove very important for many of them, and for their country, only a few years later on December 7, 1941.

A few survivors of the Civilian Conservation Corps live to this day. An increasing amount of the work necessary to keep the memory of this vast, vanished troop alive is carried on by descendants and the state of Michigan. The Mackinac Island CCC camp has disappeared, but several permanent buildings from a camp in the northern Lower Peninsula, located adjacent to North Higgins Lake State Park, has been preserved. The Michigan CCC Museum, not too far from Roscommon, is open during the summer months. It provides visitors from all over the United States with an introduction to the hard but rewarding lives of the CCC's recruits.