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The "CC Boys" Left Their Mark

In the depths of The Great Depression a generation of “lost” young men rediscovered themselves and redeveloped the mountains.

By Ted Carter
First Published: Our State, February 1974

This is a story of the great depression of the 1930’s and its effect on the city of Asheville and the mountains around it. The story weaves itself around the web of a unique, gallant organization called simply “The CCC.” It’s the fabulous, true story of a generation of “lost” young men who extricated themselves from the ruins of an economic world and went out into the wilds to rediscover themselves. In doing so they rediscovered and redeveloped our national parks and forests.

The corps started as a make-work plan but quickly became much more than that. It was born in the agonies of the depression years (March 31, 1933) and had its death throes at Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). In its good life it gave sanctuary and peace to the millions.

It left only footprints on the hills of time, but it needs no real monument to remember. It’s become part of our natural heritage—our folklore of giants who strode this land—Crockett, Bunyan, Henry. The CC Boys have joined them—men molding mountains, and being molded by them. — T.C.

We picked them up at the starting tee of a beautiful mountain golf course one splendid summer morning — a handsome happy honeymooning couple from somewhere in Pennsylvania. They weren’t much at the game of golf, but then who really cares how well you play on a gorgeous day in the mountains. It’s the class you show that matters. They showed good breeding.

The young man stopped abruptly at the fringe of the first green, gazed over the great green meadow, pointed his putter at a verdant hill and proclaimed to all about him, “Of all that I have ever seen this is the most beautiful country.”

Now it’s obvious, of course, that most honeymooning couples see the world as an azure land, but the fact is, Western North Carolina is the most beautiful. You’ve only to look to see it.

Looking around at the hills today you marvel at Mother Nature and at man for so gently uncovering her.

It didn’t happen that way, though. Not by a long shot.

It’s a known fact that “growing” civilizations are notoriously wasteful and messy. They’re in a hurry to get somewhere. They rarely look behind to see what a mess they’re leaving.

That was especially true in the Western North Carolina mountains. What the pioneers left behind was little enough to brag about. It continued through the 1930s. The World War I years and the roaring 20s that were a part of them proved especially messy. When they had passed on into the annals of time, most of our forests passed with them.

Huge lumber companies located along the French Broad River from Newport, Tennessee to Rosman, North Carolina cut over thousands of forest acres. At the same time, small-fry operators using mobile units cut over the small farm woodlands up every cove and creek bed. They left their ruins behind them.

Asheville Boomed

There was good reason for the cutting: The price was right; the Yanks had just returned from a European war singing a jingle that went “How’re you goin’ to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Parie!” Not having the ready cash to promote their move to the city, they sold their timber to get it—and the “urbanization” of America continued.

Asheville was the center for a rich “Jet-Set” then—“The Miami Beach of the Mountains,” a booming mountain metropolis—the “in” place to visit. Asheville promoted itself through a magnificent “Rhododendron Festival,” a whole week of festivities equaled over the United States only by the Mardi Gras. Governors and beauty queens from all the southern states rode in its giant parades. The only ones to equal it today are the Rose and the Orange Bowl Parades. Famous “name” bands played in town, sometimes two or three of them. Thousands swayed to their music in giant tobacco warehouses. Everybody danced, then.

Everybody bought expensive homes and everybody drove expensive automobiles—Packards, Cadillacs, LaSalles, Hupmobiles, Cords, Buicks, Auburns. Skyscraper hotels were built downtown and even on the tops of mountains. The towering Fleetwood on Hendersonville’s Jump Off Rock could be seen on a clear day all the way from Asheville. Biltmore Forest, Royal Pines, Beverly Hills and Beaver Lake were new housing developments.

Asheville built herself a fancy new city hall, a courthouse, a million dollar high school, expensive new churches and an ultra-modern downtown “Arcade” shopping center. Things were like that all over the nation.

The Depression Stayed

Then our troubles began. No sooner had the farm boys moved to town than they moved back home again. The biggest “boom” we’d ever seen ended in the biggest depression. Banks closed, the stock market crashed, “paper” millionaires took the high dive out of skyscrapers. Soon more than 25 percent of all labor forces could find no work for their talents. It was a worldwide depression.

It was first thought of as a natural thing—part of the “business cycle”; but this one didn’t go away. It hung on, year after year, with nobody doing anything about it.

On top of that, it forgot to rain and the whole land began to sizzle. Streams dried up, wells went dry, a huge dust bowl appeared in the mid-west, complete with locusts and grasshoppers. Dust clouds blew over the land. If it drizzled, it rained in colors.

Western North Carolina wasn’t much to brag about during those years. The whole of the land was being farmed again to support all those people who moved back to the county. The hills were washing away, the creeks running muddy, mountain springs were drying up because of the cut-over forests. The tourist business was dead, hotels had closed, others grew dilapidated. The unemployed were everywhere. A soup kitchen on Pack Square saw long lines of men running half a block down Broadway. Grown men with college degrees tried to peddle apples. Sometimes they hawked newspapers. The natural beauty that bloomed in the hills disappeared in the survival struggle. What you see in the mountains now is not those awful hillsides. A lot happened since then.

Herbert Hoover was president when we began our great gallop into the quagmire of depression. He kept saying it would go away, but somehow it didn’t. It just hung on, and on. When the “bonus” (veterans) army descended on Washington, he ordered McArthur, Eisenhower and Patton to drive them away. Nobody liked that. In the next election they got rid of him. F.D. Roosevelt then crashed the scene, moved like the winds of April, leaving us a bit breathless. With him swept a great throng of talented young “new dealers.” He made superb usage of them. They came up with some great ideas. Four of those ideas “retreaded” the mountains for us—The Civilian Conservation Corps, The Public Works Administration (and WPA), The Tennessee Valley Authority and The Conservation Movement.

The Public Works Administration started it all off. More than 4 million people were soon on its work rolls. They organized 400,000 projects, built 500,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools and 500 airports.

Birth of the CCC

In 1933 Roosevelt himself dreamed up the idea of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The idea was to give young men “a period of financial security during a tremendous economic depression.” That is exactly what the corps did. The army furnished the commanding officers, the Department of Agriculture and Interior supervised the work (Forestry and Parks Service) and the Department of Labor did the recruiting. By the middle of June that year more than 300,000 young men were out in the woods in 1,300 camps of their own making. They came from everywhere—city and country.

They learned trades, learned to be proud of themselves and learned self-discipline. Their monthly wage was $30.00, with $25.00 sent home to the family. All their needs were provided for.

Each recruit was given a distinct uniform, checked by doctors and dentists, fed well and treated with respect. He worked outdoors and became healthy. The cost to the nation was $1,075 per boy (over 2,700,000 of them), but it was paid back many times over through conservation, preservation and the health of young America. One single enormous project was the planting of 200,000,000 trees as a barrier against the dust bowl.

Of all the new deal projects, the CCC received perhaps the greatest acclaim.

Everybody felt close to it. On its 3rd anniversary Roosevelt praised it, saying: “…The promptness with which you seized the opportunity to engage in honest work; the willingness with which you have performed your daily tasks and the fine spirit you have shown in winning the respect of the communities in which your camps have been located merits the admiration of the whole country.”

52 Camps

The first CCC recruits in North Carolina (District A) were taken to Fort Bragg, organized, then sent out into the fields to build their own camps. They took small army tents with them to live in while building permanent barracks. They built 52 camps, reaching from the Outer Banks—Nags Head—Diamond Shoals Lighthouse to Hot Springs near the Tennessee state line. (The Great Smokies were in another district.)

The Asheville “sub-district” consisted of camps at Barnardsville (Company 409, NCF8); Mars Hill (Company 3424, NCTVA2—Camp Joe); Hot Springs (Company 407, NCF7—Camp Alex Jones); Asheville (Bent Creek) (Company 3402, NCF22—Rocky Cove Camp); Marion (Company 401, NCF4—Buck Creek); Old Fort (Company 406, NCF3—Curtis Creek); and Bakersville (Company 2432, TVA1—World War I Veteran Camp).

Other camps at various times were located at Sunburst (above Canton), Balsam Grove (above Rosman), Arden, North Mills River, Brevard, Pisgah (John’s Rock) and Mount Mitchell (Camp Alice).

There were 8 camps in the Great Smokies National Park—Big Creek, Forney Creek, 20 Mile Creek, Deep Creek, Kephart Prong, Black Camp Gap, Smokemont and Cataloochee. About the same numbers were on the Tennessee side and more were in the far west counties.

In later years the camps were often moved to various places where their work was needed.

The Money Went Home

Each camp was commanded by an army captain with the aid of a couple of lieutenants. A park “foreman” from the Forest or Parks Service was overseer of the camp work. There was a doctor at each camp, often a civilian.

Each camp had about 200 boys, with 20-25 local men who knew the mountains to direct the crews on the trails.

The usual camp consisted of four army-type barracks with about 50 boys in each. There was a mess hall, a latrine and showers. Local men had separate headquarters as did the army officers.

Campers were supposed to be on welfare but recruiters didn’t look very closely at this regulation. Boys from well-to-do families often signed up to live out in the woodlands. The salary scale ran from $30-45.00 for “privates” and “leaders.” Most of the money was sent home to aid the families on relief.

All camps in National Forests built trails and roads. They used hand tools where possible —picks, shovels, wheel barrows and trucks, but heavy machinery was available whenever needed. Some camps used their machinery for training purposes. The campers blasted rocks on the trails, using dynamite. They did some logging, built their own camps, bridges over creeks and tourist camping shelters. They manned fire towers and look-outs. They fought forest fires and replanted areas afterwards.

Each camp had a special designation with its number. NCF8 meant North Carolina Forestry. NC TVA2 meant land conservation and bank mulching, tree planting, often on private property. It was prevention of soil erosion.

Campers worked 5 1/2 days a week. A day in camp started with army-style reveille and ended with retreat, but that’s all the army there was to it. The boys wanted army drills, but the public outcry prevented it. At nighttime on weekends camp trucks ran the boys into the nearest town and brought them back about midnight.

Some Personal Recollections

Ed McCarthy of 43 Grand View Drive, Asheville, N.C. told us about the camp at Big Creek (near Waterville on I 40). He had a radio license so he was sent to set up communications atop Mount Sterling. “It was seven steep miles up there,” he said, “sometimes I’d jog down about sundown and catch a truck for Newport (Tenn.). That’s where we went to be with people. The last truck brought us back after midnight. Sometimes we’d stop at a filling station in Cosby. You know, Cosby was the bootleg capitol of the USA then. You could buy a half-gallon jug of corn liker for 75 cents. (Cosby was “Thunder Road” of a movie made in Asheville some years ago). We were told that if we ran up on a still, to get the hell out of there and leave it alone. If we bothered or reported one, they’d set the forests on fire in retaliation. I still remember jogging back up that trail about three o’clock in the morning.”

Ted Hall of Canton, N.C. served in the Bent Creek Camp one year, until it “broke up” and the 200 campers were sent by troop train to Junction City, Oregon (40 miles from Eugene). They then traveled over a mountain range by truck to the Triangle Lake campsite. “ When I was at Bent Creek,” he said, “we trapped deer in boxes like rabbit gums. Then we took them over to the Mills River Nursery where they were shipped to other parks over the nation. We also built the campground at Frying Pan Gap. We had a ‘side camp’ up there and we kept the road up to the area. Our company was on one big forest fire for six weeks. After fires we sometimes cut down the dead timber and reset the area.”

J.W. Stubbs of 655 Brevard Road, Asheville, N.C. was also at the Bent Creek Camp. “ We built the Buttermilk Gap Road and we were always kept busy with our deer count.”

Amos Harwood of Bairds Cove, Asheville, N.C. was at John’s Rock Camp (on the Davidson River at the Brevard, N.C. entrance to Pisgah Forest). “We had many big fires,” he said, “we fought them with shovels and rakes. Sometimes we built fire lines and fought with back fires and bushes. We also cleared out a lot of brush and we put fish in the streams. I cut hair for spending money, at 20 cents a head. When I got through with them, they had a real hair cut—not like what they’re wearing today. They fed us wonderfully. We didn’t have much time to play ball, but some of the boys had guitars and banjos. They played and sang after supper. We had good dentists and doctors. On weekends when we weren’t on fire duty, a truck would take us to Brevard or Asheville. There were thousands of deer around us. I counted 99 one day when coming home from the Pink Beds.”

Emerson Metcalf, 304 Beal Street, Asheville, N.C. told how the CC boys caught baby deer just after they had been born and before they were old enough to run well. “ We bottle-fed them in our deer nursery. They made marvelous pets and they’d often follow us all around the camp.”

William “Doc” Scroggs was at Sunburst (above Canton) and at Smokemont (Cherokee). “We built the first road from Newfound Gap over to Clingman’s Dome,” he said, “and we built that old wooden tower that used to stand on top.” Mark Summer, Sr. of 198 Kimberly Avenue, Asheville, N.C. was a reserve army officer then. He was called to active duty in 1933. He commanded camp 1458 at Sugarlands, Tennessee, near Gatlinburg. The boys first established a tent camp, then built their own permanent barracks by sawing blighted chestnut timbers. He later commanded the camp at High Point and a down east “sub-ditrict”—(Manteo - Cape Hatteras – Washington, etc.). He was then sent to cooks and bakers school at Fort Benning, then he returned to become the supply officer for the whole of District “A” (North Carolina). He can name from memory just about every North Carolina camp—in the order of the highways he traveled—Walnut Cove, Madison, Reidsville, Yanceyville (above Winston-Salem), Gastonia, Kings Mountain, Forest City on US 74 to Charlotte.

“We had 52 camps,” he said, “from the Diamond Shoals Lighthouse to Hot Springs. Mrs. Roosevelt got into the act with her camps for World War I Veterans. There was one over at Bakersville. The Roosevelts took care of the veterans. Herman Hickman, the rotund all-American footballer from Tennessee, came over to our Gatlinburg camp one day and offered to put on a wrestling show for us. We paid four wrestlers five dollars a piece to put the show on for us. Hickman was referee. He got into a fuss with two wrestlers (staged, of course) then announced to the crowd that he’d wrestle them both next week. He really did it. The boys got $30.00 a month, but $25.00 of it was sent home. Five dollars was all they needed. We had a little canteen for them—cokes cost a nickel, so did big bars of candy and for a nickel you could also buy a bag of ‘Hoover Dust’—a little cloth sack of ‘Golden Grain’ smoking tobacco, complete with cigarette paper. Everybody rolled their own.”

H.G. Candler was at Balsam Grove above Rosman. “That’s at the very headwaters of the French Broad,” he said, “right under the Devil’s Court House. We kept wood in the camp grounds. We’d gather seasoned old Chestnut branches and haul them to the campsites. They made the best campfires. We build a road over the Tennessee Bald to Waynesville, and when we moved to John’s Rock we worked on the graveled road up the Davidson River. I believe outside help built those beautiful stone bridges. We did some of them.”

Monroe Owens of Marion was at Curtis Creek (near Old Fort). “It’s now a game refuge,” he said. “We built the road up to the fire tower on Green Knob and we carried supplies up those 20 miles to them. We helped with the fire watch and we thinned the trees in the forest. I came here from Elizabeth City, liked it, married a local girl and never went back to the sea coast”

Clarence W. Sparks of 1253 Hendersonville Road, Asheville, N.C. was at Camp F7 at Hot Springs, N.C. “We did a lot of trail work to the tower on Rich Mountain and to our auxiliary camp over the mountain from Paint Rock. We built recreation areas and the Silver Mine swimming pool. We had trucks and motor graders. I was powder man and did the blasting. We maintained our own rock crusher. We also did bank mulching, erosion control and sometimes we set our pine seedlings on private farms around the area.

“Our camp was right in town—across the highway from the depot. We used the Oteen Hospital and we had our own ambulance service. We treated trees for the blight, cut some down and hauled them to the mill, then planted new trees in the area. We had our own workshops for carpentry, paint shops, manual training and mechanics. We studied heavy equipment. I helped teach classes and I taught some World War I veterans in the Mars Hill camp. We played baseball, had a recreation room with pool tables and we pitched horseshoes. We had reveille, retreat, fire drills and calisthenics, but there were no marching drills like the army.

“Our worse fire was in 1939 when we were called to Mount Mitchell. Thousands of acres were burnt over. We spent eight full days on that one. Later, crews from the Marion and Morganton camp replanted the area. The CCC camp was a fine thing. It was good for us during the depression and we did a lot of useful things out in the forests. “It makes you feel good to go out in the woods and find some of the trails and campsites you helped to build. You often see markers in the park to pioneers or naturalists, but there are none for the CC Boys. Nobody now remembers—none but the CC Boys.”

It would have been nice, the other day, out on that great green golf pasture if the CC Boys had been there; for the little green vale the young man pointed out, in his moment of natural exuberance, was the site of an old CC Camp.