The Past Becomes Present
As early as 1930, citizens and officials across the United States had begun to realize that a new additional park would indeed encompass and preserve the Great Smoky Mountains. Hard-working Maj. J. Ross Eakin, the first superintendent of the park, arrived at the beginning of the next year from his previous post in Montana’s Glacier National Park and was quickly introduced to the cold, mid-January winds of the Great Smokies and some of the controversies that had arisen during establishment of the park.
At first, Eakin and his few assistants limited their duties to the basics; they marked boundaries, prevented hunting, fought and forestalled fire. But as the months passed, as the park grew in size and its staff increased in number, minds and muscles alike tackled the real problem of shaping a sanctuary which all the people of present and future generations could enjoy.
Help came from an unexpected quarter. The economic depression that had gripped the country in 1930 tightened its stranglehold as the decade progressed. In the famous “Hundred Days” spring of 1933, a special session of Congress passed the first and most sweeping series of President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. The Civilian Conservation Corps, created in April, established work for more than two million young men. CCC camps, paying $30 a month for work in conservation, flood control, and wilderness projects, sprang up.
As far as the young, struggling Great Smoky Mountains National Park was concerned, this new CCC program could not have come at a better time. Through the Corps, much-needed manpower converged by the hundreds on the Smokies from such places as New Jersey, Ohio, and New York City. Supervised by Park Service officials and reserve officers from the U.S. Army, college-age men first set up their own camps—17 in all—and then went about that old familiar labor in the Smokies, landscaping and building roads. In addition, they constructed trails, shelters, powerlines, fire towers, and bridges.
Some of their tent-strewn camps were pitched on old logging sites with familiar names like Smokemont and Big Creek. Others, such as Camp No. 413 on Forney Creek, were more remote but no less adequate. Ingenuity, sparked by necessity, created accommodations which made full use of all available resources. At Camp Forney, for instance, there was a barracks, a messhall, a bathhouse, and an officers’ quarters. Water from clear, cold Forney Creek was piped into the kitchen; food was stored in a homemade ice chest. The residents of the camp, seeing no reason why they should rough it more than necessary, added a library, a post office, and a commissary in their spare time.
The CCC men, their ages between 18 and 25, did not forget recreation. As teams organized for football, baseball, boxing, wrestling, and soccer, the hills resounded with unfamiliar calls of scores and umpires’ decisions, while the more familiar tussles of boxing and wrestling raised echoes of old partisan matches throughout the hills. At times, these young workers answered the urge to ramble, too. One of them later recalled his days as a radio man on the top of Mt. Sterling:
“It was seven miles steep up there, and sometimes I’d jog down about sundown and catch a truck for Newport. That’s where we went to be with people. The last truck brought us back after midnight.”
A minor problem sometimes arose when the CCC “outsiders” began dating local girls; farming fathers sometimes set fires to give the boys something else to do during the weekends. The conflict of cultures was thrown into a particularly sharp light when a Corps participant shot a farmer’s hog one night and shouted that he had killed a bear!
On the whole, however, the Civilian Conservation Corps program in the Great Smoky Mountains was a major success. In one or two extremely rugged areas of the park, retired loggers were hired in 10-day shifts to hack out or even drill short trail lengths. The rest of the 965-kilometer (600-mile) trail system, together with half a dozen fire towers and almost 480 kilometers (300 miles) of fire roads and tourist highways, was the product of the CCC. When Superintendent Eakin evaluated the work of only the first two years of the CCC’s operation, he equated it with a decade of normal accomplishment.