The Civilian Conservation Corps at Guernsey State Park

CCC Worker Statue Number 53 of 65 in America

As I look at society and the world of work in our country now, I am amazed at what was accomplished by the CCC in the 1930s. Two camps worked nearly four years in putting together, what today is, Guernsey State Park. Camp Nine was located between the Museum and the Spillway on the east side. Camp Ten, the west side camp, was situated on the south side of Skyline Drive at the foot of Mae West Hill.

Plaque on the Statue Base

The following three paragraphs are from my book – The Civilian Conservation & the Building of Guernsey State Park – With Folktales and Stories of the Park. Take a look at a free sample here.

  By 1935 there were 2,650 CCC camps in the United States with camps located in all of the forty-eight states. Young men, most with their first real job earned thirty dollars a month. Although a good number of people called this salary a dollar a day, it is not strictly accurate as weekends were off for the CCC men.  This would mean most worked twenty to twenty-five days per month, making their pay slightly more than a dollar a day. On a national level, there were some protests, thinking this salary too low, even for what many believed was a government handout. For the most part, the men were happy to have work and no records, which I have run across, report organized protests from workers in any of the Civilian Conservation Corps camps.

The Magnificent CCC Museum Built by Camp Nine

Of the $30.00 the men were paid, each month, they were allowed to keep $5.00, the rest was sent home as relief for CCC member families. The $25.00 each worker's family received every month was one of the first real attempts in America to jump start the economy during the hard times of the Great Depression.

America's Most Elaborate Picnic Shelter - The Castle - on the Parks North Bluff

 The five dollars the workers kept each month might not sound like much in present day, but in the 1930s the men were able to buy camp, vouchers used to purchase articles at the camp store.  Any money left was used during weekend trips to town.

Here I Am Talking About My Book and Guernsey State Park

Want to see more? Take a look at a free sample here. 

The View From Mae West Hill on Skyline Drive

The Museum Had a Birthday

On Friday, June 2, 1939, the Museum at Guernsey State Park opened. If my math is correct, that would make it 81 last week. – Happy Birthday - 

Interesting and sad that the hard-working Civilian Conservation Corps men, who built it, were all gone by the opening date. The last CCC workers left Guernsey in August of 1938.

Guernsey State Park CCC Museum

I spent nearly an hour trying to find a few other events, famous events that happened on that day. Guess what? Not much could be found. Maybe I should have started this post with the headline, Today’s Most Important Event in America - The Opening of Guernsey State Park’s Fabulous CCC Museum. That sounds pretty good and not nearly as grim as the only other happening that made much news that day, a brutal beating murder in Chicago.

My Grandson Looking Around Inside the Museum
Actually, I told Him to Pretend He was Looking at the Displays
Then I Had a Hard Time Getting Him to Leave
History is Great for all Ages
(photo from 2015)

Want to learn more about Guernsey State Park? Take a look at my book on the CCC and the building of the park here. It is available in softcover and as an eBook, a large number of photos both new and historical, (200 or so) in the book, make the softcover an excellent coffee table, office, or gift book. Take a look today, and thanks!

Happy Birthday!

Just One of the Wonderful Views From the Museum

*This post is an updated version of a 2016 post. Thanks for reading.

Kellum Memorial Benches Added to the Park

A nice crowd was present today for a wonderful ceremony at the Museum.

The special event being the dedication of the Kellum Memorial Benches. The two new stone benches are a great addition to the area of the Civilian Conservation Corps Worker Statue near the Museum.

Along with the unveiling of the benches was the announcement of the new placement of the Stretch and Dotty Hennings benches. They have been reset in a delightful shady area in front of the Museum overlooking the lake.

Stretch and Dottie's bench now relocated

The Kellum family built the second cabin in the park at a time when the CCC was still building. The family has enjoyed the park and lake for five generations.

The Civilian Conservation Corps at Guernsey State Park

Franklin D. Roosevelt included the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of his New Deal. And the Civilian Conservation Corps built Guernsey State Park. No other state park in Wyoming had any CCC work. That makes Guernsey a one of a kind park.

CCC built Castle on the North Bluff

Want to learn more, you can order my new book here, or you can purchase a copy at the Museum.

If you haven't visited for a while a trip up to the CCC built Museum is in order.

Here is a snippet from the book. This particular story is from one of  the, folklore in the park, sections.

The Story of the Body in the Gulch 

A man, known only as Black, nobody really knew if Black was his last name or a nickname. He had been in and around the Cheyenne to Black Hills stage route for several weeks, sometimes riding shotgun on one of the dangerous runs. More often, if he had money, he hung around the Cheyenne Club or one of the many gambling concerns in Deadwood.

Once when a stage traveler admired his fancy spurs he said he’d won them in a poker game. Another time he mentioned buying them in Mexico.

Curious people questioned how someone who apparently did not work on a regular basis could afford such an expensive pair of spurs. But why not, he was also described as wearing handmade boots he’d special ordered to fit his feet. Some of the new style, individually made from a place in Kansas.

Privately Black had told a table of his poker playing pals that he found the spurs on a body, “a way’s up a gulch,” near the North Platte River. Since he was more often broke than not most believed this to be true. So how does all of this tie into a story?

The real story might be the finding of the body, one man found it, no one else ever saw it. The man, Black, who proudly owned a new set of spurs appeared only briefly in the area and never was heard from again. A few years’ later locals commonly believed that no one simply walked upon a decaying body with the spurs. Instead believing someone was killed in the gulch, most stories named Black as the killer, with the spurs being part, or all of the take from the crime.

Maybe the body in the Gulch looked like me - no, probably not that old.

Some modern tales make the dead man out as a park haunting ghost who today frequents the Red Cloud shelter area. But who was he really? The man might have been a murderer lawman with the body later dumped in the gulch or a drummer (traveling peddler), or a women. Today when the wind blows out of the south-south-west an eerie, haunting howl, can be heard in and around Dead Man’s Gulch. The entirety of the story sounds much more like a tall-tale than history, and perhaps it is, but the story of the Dead Man’s Gulch still makes for lively conversation more than a century later.

Want to read more?

 Go here and read the first few pages. 

I still like the hard copy better than the ebook because depending on the e-reader some of the photos and captions do not stay together, but the text is fine and so are the photos, just seems like more white space than needed - still a good read.

Far off the beaten path and if you know where to look - The CCC didn't always get everything cleaned up. Today this makes for great photos for a historian. It also allows me to wonder about a day in the life of a CCC worker. 

A Trip to the Museum

It is always a nice day to take a trip to the Guernsey State Park Museum. If you look, hard enough, there is always something new and interesting to discover.

 

 For some reason I became curious about the fire brick, clean and nice, in the Museum Library’s fireplace. Made by the Denver Clay Company they read, Hifire, fire brick.

A quick look at online antique sites, it looks like this type of brick is a good seller, usually selling for around $40 including postage.

The Company came into existence in the late 1870s, and by the 1890s was incorporated and into many types of mining equipment and chemical sales along with the fire brick branch. The building that made the fire brick burned to the ground in 1937 and I could find no record of the fire brick being manufactured there again.

 

Lots of interesting stories in the park, take a look.

 

Guernsey State Park - Roundtop Mountain

Our most recent park adventure took us on a hike up Roundtop Mountain, the mountain behind the Museum, you know, the one with the kind of round top. 

Roundtop

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the Roundtop Mountain Trail as part of their east side trail system. The trail has long since been forgotten. Jan and I have hiked in the park since 1983, and the trail, to our knowledge, has never been marked during that time. That means it has been lost, at least, three decades. Likely the 1970s since the trail was marked or used, but probably longer than that.

The CCC maps show a circle around the mountain and a pigtail trail up to the top from the main circle. We spent several hours trying to find the old trail and did discover parts of it. 

CCC trail steps northeast of museum

On the south side of the mountain a rock slide appears to have covered a section of 100 feet or more. My guess is the trail was let go at this point of the slide and unmarked and unused since that time. 

The trail ( above the leaning cedar) southwest side of mountain

The road near the top

But two senior adventures like my wife and myself wouldn’t be deterred by a little landslide. Well, yes we were, but we still made it to the top. The old road that starts on the northeast side of the mountain makes a fine trail. It took only about twenty minutes to reach the top using the old road and the hike was invigorating.

Give it a try, this one is fun, not too difficult and the view is spectacular.

The view from the top - worth the hike

One warning – The first one hundred yards are deeply rutted, so step carefully, once you reach the south side of the mountain the trail is fine.

Guernsey State Park and Happy Birthday Yellowstone

Happy Birthday to the greatest park on earth, Yellowstone, who turns 142 today, certainly doesn’t look it.  

Much of the Civilian Conservation Corps work at Guernsey State Park is a reflection of the Parkitecture movement so prevalent in Yellowstone. Parkitecture was the movement sometimes called, rustic architecture, where natural settings blend into the buildings.

Here is a recent picture of Sitting Bull Shelter at Guernsey State Park – a great example of Parkitecture.

Obviously the centerpiece of the movement in the park is the Museum. I took this photo two weeks ago. See how well nature and construction can blend?

Guernsey State Park and FDR's New Deal - The Men of the CCC

Guernsey State Park is well known as a popular destination for water sports enthusiasts. But did you know that it is one of America’s best historical sites to take a close look at Civilian Conservation Corps History?

Dozens of projects undertaken by CCC workers in the 1930s are still in use in the park today. For those of you who dozed off in high school history class the CCC was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Civilian Conservation Corps was the government’s attempt to put young men back to work. Guernsey State Park was built by theses CCC workers, the park having two camps, one on each side of the lake.

Although the park abounds in wonderful reminders of the CCC and their work building the park, here are my five favorites.

1.     The Museum – The Museum is on the east side of the lake and was built by CCC camp Br-9, which was located down the deep valley south of the museum.

2.     Lakeshore Drive – Lakeshore Drive crosses the dam and follows the east shore. The drive leaves the park at Long Canyon and leads on into the town of Hartville. The drive from Guernsey to Hartville via Lakeshore Drive may be the most beautiful drive in all of eastern Wyoming.

3.     Sitting Bull Picnic Shelter- Located on Lakeshore Drive

4.     Skyview Drive – This is the main road on the west side, unlike Lakeshore Drive, it is not paved but the surface is well maintained, hard packed, gravel.

5.     The Castle- The Guernsey State Park Castle can be reached by taking Skyview Drive to its termination on the North Bluff. While there check out the, Million Dollar Biffy, the most ornate and overbuilt comfort station in all of Wyoming’s state park system. Skyview Drive, the Castle and the, Million Dollar Biffy were all projects of Camp BR-10 although the Castle was finished up by the men of Camp BR-9.

For true history buffs, the Powderhouse at Camp BR-10 and the bridge on the Brimmer Point walking trail are musts. (Unfortunately the bridge on the Brimmer Point trail was burned in the terrible fire in the summer of 2012 but the terrific stone work is still in place)

The Powderhouse may be one of the least visited historical places in the park. To find the Powderhouse take Skyview Drive the road left from the park entrance pay station, (the road to sandy beach) after going up the mountain (May West Hill) and coming down you will find a turnoff to the left, south, at the bottom of the hill. This is across the road from the beginning of Tunnel Mountain Trail. The old Powderhouse is only about one-hundred yards northwest from this turn off. The turn off is steep but there is room to turn around at the bottom.

The Powderhouse has a small bright metal (unfortunately) interpretive sign. If you are adventurous many ruins from old camp BR-10 are in the area immediately west of the Powderhouse strung out for nearly a quarter of a mile.

On a final note - If you have taken a long drive to reach Guernsey State Park check out the hiking trails. Wonderful views with many great photo opportunities and great exercise also.

                         "The Worker" - Civilian Conservation Corp statue at the Museum