Remembering a Soil Conservation Camp: Co. 3665, SCS-19, Wisconsin

By:  Fay Cunningham, Member

 The stereotypical CCC camp worked in national or state forests or parks.  The work was supervised by the National Forest Service, the National Park service or their State counterparts.  There was a lesser known group of camps which were overseen by the Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture and were called SCS Camps.  These camps worked on both public, and more commonly, private land to repair and protect the soil from the ravages of wind and water erosion during and after the “Dust Bowl” years.  The long term abuse of the soil by poor farming methods had also wreaked its toll.

I had the opportunity to join one of these camps.  I had graduated from high school in January, 1939 at 16 years of age with no money for college and no job opportunities.  After working on and off for a year on odd jobs at minimum pay (of $0.25/hr) or less, I joined the CCC and was sent to Co. 3665, Camp Cochrane, Wisconsin (SCS-19)  The camp was located near the Mississippi River in hilly farming country.  The camp was organized in the usual manner with the Army running the camp itself and the SCS running the workday.  We had two Army officers, the Company Commander and Executive Officer. And three Army sergeants, a First Sergeant, A mess Sergeants, and a Supply Sergeant.  We had the standard tar paper covered wooden buildings with four barracks, a mess hall, latrine, office area, classroom building, canteen, supply building and a number of other service buildings, garages, etc.  At the time, enrollees were paid $30 a month, Assistant Leaders $36, and Leaders $45.  $22 of each man’s pay was sent to the enrollee’s families, leaving $8 the basic enrollee received in camp.  Of course food, housing, and clothing were provided by the Army.  The basic living responsibilities and discipline we all learned there stood us in good stead in a few years when  the vast majority of us joined the military in World War II, as well as all through life.  There was no military training per se in the CCC.

The private farms in the area were fairly large, from 300 to 600 acres in general and were primarily dairy farms.  They consisted of broad valley bottom land, steep hillsides, rising some 400 feet above the valleys, and in some cases broad plateaus on top of the hills.  The hillsides in general were forested with deciduous trees, oaks, hickory, maple aspen and birch, but primarily oak.    Many hillsides had been turned into pasture with resulting loss of trees and a high incidence of gully erosion.  Bottom land fields were rectangular regardless of the slope.  High soil loss crops such as corn and small grains had been repeatedly planted in the same fields.

SCS agronomists and foresters would meet with farmers and sign them up for a program to improve the soil conservation and fertility of their farm.  The CCC would do certain things and the farmer would agree to do certain things.  A master plan for the farm would be developed and agreed upon.  The field alignment would be modified to conform to the fencing and the CCC would cut the posts from the farm woodlot and install the fence.  The steeper slopes would no longer be pastured and would be reforested by the CCC.  The fields were to be strip cropped following contours.  A 10 year plan was developed for each strip which would rotate leguminous (nitrogen fixing) crops such as alfalfa which grains and corn in such a manner that rivulets of water would not have long paths with open crops.  This would take into account the feed needs of the farm for its cattle.  Our camp operated a large quarry where limestone was blasted out and crushed to powder and delivered to the farmer for him to spread to sweeten the acidic soil.  Where gullies had started, the CCC would cut brush and bundle it and place it in the gully as a dam to slow water velocity and retain soil to repair the gully.  On large gullies, small concrete cams were sometimes constructed.  A detailed forest survey of the large forested areas would be carried out.  This would result in a timber type, size and growth rate map which would tell the farmer where, what size, and how much timber to harvest for a perpetual harvest.  The primary timber produced was railroad ties and fence posts.  This was a valuable cash crop for the farmer.

My first three weeks I was on a brush cutting crew for brush dams.  Working with an axe all day was good exercise.  I had been taking an evening class in forestry and the forester selected four of us to be a new timber cruising crew with me as foreman, later being promoted to Assistance Leader.  Our job entailed making a systematic survey of tree density, size (diameter and height), type of tree and rate of growth.  This involved taking representative sample plots and tabulating the above in detail.  It involved some surveying and much walking up and down  the hills.  In February and March this was in deep snow and at temperatures frequently well below zero.  A truck would drop us off in the morning and pick us up in late afternoon, frequently miles from our drop off

point.  We carried our lunch and many times had to build a fire at noon to thaw out our sandwiches before we could eat them as well as thaw ourselves out a bit.

As the weather moderated this became a very pleasant task, not having to write with chopper mitts on anymore and working in the forest all day.  When May came, all work in the camp switched to tree planting.  My crew had the responsibility of working in the camp nursery, heeling in the trees, watering them, and preparing the bundles of trees for the next day’s planting.  Our camp planted over 100,000 trees that spring, frequently on steep hillsides difficult to get to.

I had been saving my money to start Michigan State in September.  Since you could get an honorable discharge anytime if you were returning to school, I signed over in July and went home September 1.  I managed to get two years of engineering in before enlisting in the Army.  I had Field Artillery basic training where my CCC surveying experience was helpful.  I was then selected for the Special Engineering Detachment, Manhattan District, Corps of Engineers.  This was the group who developed and built the atom bomb.  I played a minor but important role in this project and was a radiation monitor at the Bikini tests* in 1946.

I have returned twice to visit the area we worked in, the last time in 1988.  It was gratifying to see that strip cropping and presumably crop rotation was still the norm and that the farms looked lush and productive.  It was of particular pleasure to me to see the healthy forested areas we had planted some 50 years before.  My experience in the CCC was definitely positive.  I developed from an insecure 17 year old boy with little hope for the future into a confident 18 year old man ready to meet the world.  I strongly support the mission to reinstall a modern program similar to the CCC. 

[*Bikini Atoll is in the Marshal Islands, South Pacific, where atomic testing was done.]  

ON THIS PAGE

CCC Legacy Articles

Jan/Feb 2010

Vol. 34, Issue 1

 Co 3665, SCS-19

Jan/Feb 2010

Vol. 34 Issue 1

Newspaper article

Rhinelander, 

CCC Boys Snow Rescue

Nov/Dec 2009

Vol. 33 Issue 6

Co. 633, Interstate Park

Bison Dig Site 

CCC Legacy Journal:  November / December 2009, Vol. 33, Issue 6

The Interstate Park Bison Site and the Legacy of the CCC in Wisconsin

By  Wisconsin Historical Society - Member

Author Marlin Hawley, Museum Archeology Program 

I am not of the CCC generation; my interest in the CCC is in its impact, along with that of other New Deal era work relief programs, on American archaeology. Historians Paul Fagette, in Digging for Dollars, and Edward Lyon, in A New Deal for Southeastern Archaeology, have both highlighted the effects, both good and bad, that New Deal funding had on the development of American archaeology in the mid-and late-1930s into the early 1940s. Most work relief funding was through the WPA, though CWA, FERA and other sources were used to survey for sites, excavate and analyze collections, and produce a variety of reports on the work. Sometimes, sadly, funding was never assured and by the early 1940s with World War II looming, many relief programs shifted their goals to war preparedness activities on very short notice. Many collections were shelved and have yet to be analyzed. Because the American South offered warm winters and also had high levels of unemployment, the largest percentage of money going toward archaeological activities was in the South. As important as was the work in the South, significant work was also conducted in other parts of the United States.

Archaeological work constituted a rather minor element of the CCC’s mission, which was of course heavily oriented toward conservation activities. Indeed, the CCC had a significant impact on conservation activities in Wisconsin, where some 90,000 young men were involved in the organization. These men were deployed in several dozen camps active through the early 1940s. In addition to conservation work, CCC workers were also involved in occasional archaeological projects, including in Wisconsin where the CCC put the finishing touches on the restoration of badly looted, 1000 year old, Native American mounds on the grounds of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison and probably at Devil’s Lake, as well. The largest archaeological project conducted by the CCC in the state, however, was at Interstate Park in Polk County, northwestern Wisconsin. Here in the fall of 1936 and summer of 1937, men from Camp Interstate (Camp #633), based outside of St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, excavated a deposit—referred to as a “bone bed”—consisting mostly of the bones of an extinct species of bison.  There are some elk and deer bones, too.  These were entombed in peat at the edge of an old extension of Lake of the Dalles or possibly a pond that formerly lay close to the lake. For the past several years, Matthew G. Hill (Iowa State University), Chris D. Widga (Illinois State Museum) and I have been reinvestigating the site, studying the old collections and putting together as complete a picture of the excavations as possible from the scattered documentation.

Camp Interstate was established in November 1935 and its men were involved in constructing roads, trails, shelter houses and other facilities still lacking in the park, as well as cleaning out numerous glacial “potholes” worn in the bedrock. The work was administered by the National Park Service (NPS) for the Wisconsin Conservation Department. The park is the oldest in Wisconsin and straddles the picturesque Dalles of the St. Croix, with a unit on the Minnesota side of the river as well. Despite the fact that it was state’s oldest park, it remained undeveloped, limiting its attraction as a tourism destination.

In mid-August 1936 CCC workers in Interstate Park were digging a pipe trench through a marshy area and encountered large animal bones. As more of these were found, camp superintendent Alonzo W. Pond had one of his staff, Howard S. Kunsman, take a few over to the University of Minnesota, where zoologists recognized them as bison, possibly of the extinct species Bison occidentalis. After delays in securing permission to investigate the bone bed, work resumed in late September. Shortly, three things happened: a large, bi-pointed, hammered copper tool referred to as a “pike” was found near the bones; two small spearheads were found in amongst the bones; and enough of a skull and horn core was found to make a positive identification on the species. It was Bison occidentalis. This was important, as within the past 10 years or so bones of this species had been found with distinctive chipped stone spearheads in the American Southwest in geological settings suggesting considerable age; as old as 10,000 years and, some thought, maybe much older.  Despite a growing acceptance of the validity of the association of these stone tools and extinct bison through the 1930s, at the time of the Interstate Park Bison site excavations a great deal of controversy still attended any such find. Even so, the addition of a copper tool and small spearheads was something new. The CCC had unwittingly discovered one of the most enigmatic associations yet of artifacts and a vanished species.

My colleagues have studied the bones, all 1300 of them, in great detail, while I have worked to construct a detailed accounting of the excavations, which has proved fascinating. From the day that the copper pike was found, controversy attended almost every move at the site, deep into the winter of 1936—the crew was obliged to mount a tent over the excavation and work inside with a barrel stove blazing all day—and into the next summer when the excavation went into a second season. To start, there was disagreement between Pond, a trained archaeologist, and the NPS on how to proceed. (Pond resigned in October 1936 over a disagreement with the NPS, though one not involving the bone bed excavation.) Then, too, when NPS geologist C.L. Cooper presented papers on the site at two conferences, including one involving many of the country’s top specialists in what was then called the “Early Man problem,” his report was met with extreme skepticism. Native American copper working was still generally thought of as a relatively recent phenomenon (that is, a few hundred or maybe a thousand years old) and few could accept that the association of copper tool and an extinct species was legitimate.

Throughout the course of our re-study of the site, we have come to have a deep appreciation for the amazing work done by the CCC “boys” of Camp #633, often under truly adverse conditions. To give a few examples, winter temperatures plunged to as low as -40ºF, necessitating working inside a heated canvas tent. On top of that, the excavation was in a marshy area and the pit filled with water every night, requiring almost constant pumping. Additionally, the camp was quarantined in May 1937 due to an outbreak of scarlet fever. Yet, despite the regrettable loss of the two spearheads, the collections that remain are in great condition. In fact, the assemblage of bison bones (there are also some elk and deer bones present) is the largest such in the eastern United States. While we know that the site was not the kill/butchery site it was thought to be by some involved in the work, the collection of bones (at the Milwaukee Public Museum, where a bull bison constructed from some of the bones is still on display) and the copper pike (Wisconsin Historical Society) are nonetheless shedding new light on the post-glacial settlement of the region (we know now, too, the site dates around 7500 years ago). Ultimately, the site’s collections are an important reminder of the hard work and dedication of the CCC and also highlight its little known role in archaeological discovery in the upper Midwest.

Thanks to the Wisconsin Historical Society for sharing the CCC heritage of Wisconsin.