THE CCC IN IDAHO

(excerpt)
by Judith Austin

Idaho Yesterdays Fall, 1983

"The bill just passed by Congress provides for unemployment relief work in forestry and related fields on federal and state lands and for cooperation between the federal government and the states in doing work on private lands for the prevention and control of forest fires insects and tree diseases and floods the latter probably including control of soil erosion stop urge you sound state forester or other representative to conference in my office in Washington beginning nine a.m. April 6 for purpose of making plans for the execution of this program on state and private lands=

S (sic) A Wallace Secretary of Agriculture"

of so read a telegram sent to Idaho's governor, C. Ben Ross, on the afternoon of March 31, 1933. And so the most popular of all New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps, began -- only ten days after legislation to establish the program had been introduced in Congress.

Over and over again, its supporters emphasized the dual nature of the program: the conservation of land and forests, and the conservation of the young men who served in the CCC. The statistics bear out their emphasis. More than two and a half-million young men were enrolled in the 4,500 camps that were established at some point in the CCC's nine-year existence. Each of them was paid $30 per month, and generally $25 of that was sent directly to a family member who was eligible to receive relief payments. The enrollees planted over 2.3 billion trees, spent six and a half-million man-days fighting fires, and worked on twenty-one million acres of forests in the effort to plant trees and protect those already standing from plant disease (chiefly white pine blister rust) and insect damage (chiefly bark beetle), among other activities.

Governor Ross's response to Secretary Wallace's telegram was to send Harry C. Shellworth to Washington, D.C., as his personal representative in all matters dealing with the CCC. Others went as well, including Regional Forester R.H. Rutledge and the newly elected Secretary of State, Franklin Girard (who would be appointed state forester in 1937). Shellworth was both land agent for the Boise- Payette Lumber Co. and the secretary manager of the Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association, an organization formed by private timber holders to provide a mechanism for fire control and prevention on their lands in the southern part of the state. He was also a member of the state board of forestry. Given Shellworth's substantial experience in working with state and federal land managers, he was a logical choice both for the immediate responsibilities assigned him and as the liaison from Ross to the CCC in all matters pertaining to camps on state and private lands.

Idaho average less than 2,500 enrollees per year from within the state -- just over 20,000 in the history of the CCC. Of the total number of people employed in and by the CCC in Idaho -- enrollees, camp officers, and supervisory workers -- one-third were drawn from within the state. Most to the enrollees who worked in the region were from New York, New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kentucky, Tennessee, in the Middle West.

Thanks to the good work of state officials and the state's obvious needs, Idaho had more camps than any other state except California -- and the state ranked second in per capita expenditure for the CCC as well. The state had a total of 163 camps, lasting for an average of three years each. Among them were 109 Forest Service camps, 20 on state forests, 9 on private forest lands, 8 under the Soil Conservation Service, and 16 under the Grazing Service. The vast majority relocated south of the Salmon River. A number of the camps, in areas with particularly heavy winter weather and problems of accessibility, closed down each winter. At the peak of the CCC activity, in the summer of 1935, there were 82 camps functioning in the state. Idaho's program was regarded as being extraordinarily well administered.

One camp was in Idaho's only state park, on Lake Chacolet in northern Idaho. Although Heyburn State Park had belonged to Idaho since 1908, little improvement work had been done on the site before a CCC camp was establish their in October of 1934. The enrollees, whose work was planned by the National Park Service's San Francisco office, more than made up for previous neglect of the choice park site. In seven years, several hundred thousand dollars worth of development was done, most of it at three major sites within the park. Fire circles, boat landing slips, swimming rafts, bath houses, seats along the lake shore, picnic grounds and tables, parking areas, community kitchens, toilet facilities, two caretakers houses, a lodge (which had to be finished by the state after the CCC pulled out), campsites with fireplaces, roads, and water systems combined to turn Heyburn into a park that the state could be proud of -- and one far better than it could have created without the CCC.

The value of the CCC was unquestionable. The vast majority of the young men enrolled participated in educational programs that ranged from truck driving and w to basic literacy to college-level courses and philosophy, and thousands received high school or college diplomas because of the educational programs in the camps. Regional Forester Evan Kelley figured in the summer of 1936 that work done in the forest of Region 1 (which included northern Idaho) in three years was equivalent to nearly a decade's work by the Forest Service.

Harry Shellworth was not given to mincing words, and he took a proprietary interest in the CCC projects under his supervision. One such project, which he hoped would be turned into a true municipal park for Boise, involved road work and campsite construction on the mountain ridge above the capital city. The the campsite was used by the Shafer Butte CCC camp itself, and Shellworth arranged for a commercial photographer in Boise to take pictures of the camp enrollees' work and the setting. Unfortunately, Shellworth's hopes never came to fruition; the site of the camp -- north of the Bogus Basin ski area and Shafer Butte -- is an undeveloped part of the Boise National Forest.

Shellworth provided annotations for some of the photographs, which he had made into an album. The comments on one pair of pictures suggests his salty approach to his liaison work. The first picture shows "the illegal Caterpillar tractor," about which he said: "The damn bureaucrats said I couldn't have any heavy equipment. I told them where they could go -- they didn't hear me. I got the Cats." A later picture shows what happened after Shellworth got a call that the inspectors were coming up the hill to look at the enrollees' work: "I ran the Cat off into the brush and gave the boy shovels and rakes until the inspectors left." His general attitude toward the inspectors was not particular positive: " They know less about road work than I do about preaching."