When President Roosevelt signed the Civilian Conservation Corps bill in March 1933 as part of his New Deal, he sought to protect the wealth of forests and create ways to control floods and decrease soil erosion. The U.S. Army’s Vancouver Barracks became the training site for the Ninth Corps, which covered Southwest Washington and Oregon. Between 1933 and 1942, when the Civilian Conservation Corps program ended during World War II, 40,000 men passed through the barracks for instruction before they scattered to hundreds of smaller temporary worksites and 27 major camps dotted about the Columbia River Gorge.
At a time when more than 13 million were jobless and many more penniless, the CCC offered 2.5 million young men work. Many of the corps had never wandered more than a few miles from home. The CCC emerged as more than an economic lifeline because it offered job training, recreational opportunities and military-like camaraderie many men had never experienced.
The Army supervised CCC camps, providing enlistees with food, clothing, shelter and discipline. Enlistment promised a means to improve a young man’s life, to interact with individuals from diverse regions and to provide them with a sense of accomplishment and belonging. It also gave the Army a reserve paramilitary resource for recruits should the nation ever go to war.
Enlistees were ages 18-25 and poor. They were called “timber troopers” because they worked in the woods building roads, structures and fighting fires. They worked five days a week, and many lived in 200-man camps. Each man received $30 a month, keeping $5 and sending $25 home to their families.
Oral histories at the Clark County Historical Museum give insight into the camp at the Vancouver Barracks. One enrollee came from Louisiana. Sarah Baldwin remembers her father working for the CCC and coming home on weekends. Lee Perkins tells the soldier’s perspective. He recalls the Army dropped soldiers’ pay from $21 to $17 a month while paying CCC workers $30. “So, we hated those cotton-pickin’ civilian CC kids with a purple passion,” he told his interviewer.
Enrollees spent their free time playing sports — boxing, baseball, basketball and volleyball. During the CCC era, The Columbian’s sports pages reported on CCC games between camps and against local lineups and Vancouver Barracks teams, while notifying readers of similar upcoming games. The Army allowed camps to write and produce their own newspapers. The head of the Ninth Corps, Brig. Gen. George Marshall, created a CCC newspaper, The Review. Enrollees boosted the local economy by spending money on necessities. They watched movies at the Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver and danced at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom.
Only a few CCC buildings exist at the Fort Vancouver site today. However, in 2003, National Park Service archeologists searched for buried foundations of former structures. Archeologists conducted a ground survey using a magnetometer over the area west of today’s Fort Vancouver, where the CCC barracks once stood. The map showed U-shaped barracks foundations and roads, some blacktopped, constructed in the 1930s hidden beneath the surface.
While the CCC conducted hundreds of projects, among the better-known are the building of Bonneville Dam, the infrastructure for Beacon Rock State Park, Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood and several campgrounds and trails along the Columbia Gorge.
