Restoring the Stone photos by Jack E. Harden
~by Julia Pearson
T
he Brown County State Park was founded in 1929 and has been a nature-lover’s retreat for nearly 1.3 million visitors annually. This past year it has been a refuge for COVID-weary souls. The largest of Indiana’s 24 state parks, it encompasses 15,776 acres. Visitors today will notice the renovation works going on in the park to restore the stonework put in by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The Brown County State Park is the beautiful resource we have now because of a previous national and global economic downturn. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was formed by the federal government after the stock market crash of 1929. The CCC was a New Deal program, established by executive order on April 5, 1933. It enlisted young men between the ages of 18 and 25 for renewable terms of six months and paid them $30 per month. The men received room and board in company/work camps and were required to send $22–$25 of their monthly pay back home to their families. Hundreds of
16 Our Brown County July/August 2021
thousands of young men were employed on environmental projects and shaped the modern national and state park systems. It is estimated that 57,000 illiterate men learned to read and write in CCC camps. The U.S. Army organized the transportation of thousands of enrollees to work camps. With 300,000 men put to work by July 1, 1933, it is considered the most rapid peace time mobilization in our country’s history. Indiana’s state parks were built with the help of 64,000 enlistees during the 1930s under this program. With the mission to teach land management, soil conservation, and park construction, the CCC was under the command of the U.S. Army. Guided by the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, the CCC fought forest fires, planted trees, cleared and maintained access roads, and implemented soil-erosion controls. To encourage the use of America’s natural resources, bridges and campgrounds were
