Location: US 701 in White Lake
County: Bladen
Original Date Cast: 1992
Set up during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was designed to give relief work to men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In time nearly 3 million men were hired by the CCC at an average salary of thirty dollars per month. Directed by army officers and foresters, they worked under semi-military discipline and, according to one writer, “provided the most direct analogue of war in the whole New Deal.” Dismissed by some as “Roosevelt’s tree army,” the CCC initiated site development and improvements in 2,082 national, state, and private forests and parks across the United States.
In North Carolina the CCC had sixty-six camps, employing 13,600 men, in forty-seven counties. Camp #4482 was built at White Lake in 1935 and closed in 1942. Approximately 120 young men were housed at the facility at any one time during the period. They fought forest fires, planted pine seedlings, and built fire trails and fire towers. The results of their efforts are reflected in present-day Bladen Lake State Forest and Singletary Lake and Jones Lake State Parks.
References:
Harley E. Jolley, "That Magnificent Army of Youth and Peace": The Civilian Conservation Corps in North Carolina, 1933-1942 (2007)
Emergency Relief in North Carolina (1936)
John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942 (1967)
Alfred C. Oliver Jr. and Harold M. Dudley, This New American: The Spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps (1937)
Wilmington Star-News, April 25, 1993
North Carolina State Parks website: http://www.ils.unc.edu/parkproject/ncparks.html