During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt deployed his “Tree Army,” some 2 million young men who created parks and forestry projects across the nation.
Those men were honored Saturday with a statue in Gambrill State Park, the first dedicated to the Civilian Conservation Corps in Maryland.
About half a dozen veterans of the CCC, members of Chapter 113 Alumni in Maryland, were on hand as the statue was unveiled by Nita Settina, superintendent of the Maryland Park Service, and Walter Atwood, a former president of the national CCC association.
Atwood, 89, now a resident of Jacksonville, Fla., was the eldest of eight children born to a couple who struggled to keep a small farm going in Kansas.
“The president brought together two wasted resources — young men and land,” Atwood told the audience of about 100 guests, including park rangers and Maryland Department of Natural Resources representatives, elected officials and members of AmeriCorps, which places volunteers in projects doing everything from helping the environment to working on health, safety and community improvements.
“We worked with axes, saws, wheelbarrows and shovels, not chain saws and bulldozers,” Atwood said. He worked as a clerk at several CCC locations, and also helped fight forest fires in Idaho, he said.
Other CCC veterans said they had helped build military bases that became essential as the U.S. entered World War II, and many of them went into military service. The CCC workers received $30 a month, of which $25 went to their families.
When Settina became superintendent of the park service, she said, her first priority was to get the CCC statue erected at Gambrill Park.
Former Gov. Harry Hughes, a consistent advocate of conservation and environmental efforts, said he was old enough to remember seeing CCC workers when he was a child growing up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
“It gave these men a chance to serve their country, themselves and help their struggling families,” Hughes said.
More than 35,000 CCC workers were in Maryland during the Great Depression, he said.
“We have a little taste today of what the Great Depression was like,” he said, “but there was no Social Security, no unemployment insurance. If you were out of work, you were out of luck.”
U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-6th, said the statue of the CCC worker, shirtless with ax in hand, was a memorable sight.
“I remember that young man,” he said. “I saw him and many others growing up on a dirt farm in western Pennsylvania. They worked hard. People today don’t know what poor is until they have been on a dirt-poor farm.”
Bartlett said there should be an “Environmental Conservation Corps” today to do such work, giving jobs to the unemployed, those on welfare and even those with minor criminal records.
“They need meaningful things to do,” he said.
Mark Maas, manager of Gambrill State Park, described the park as a museum to the CCC.
“They built the overlooks, much of what is here,” he said. “Without them, Gambrill Park would not be what it is today.”
Copyright 2011 The Frederick News-Post. All rights reserved.
