Civilian Conservation Corps

This article in the New Yorker mentions the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a great-depression era federally funded work project. My grandfather actually participated in this program as a teenager before joining the Navy, and it reminded me of his stories. Here's a quote:

As a teen-ager, when I lived outside of Washington D.C., I went backpacking with friends along the Appalachian Trail, which runs from Maine to Georgia. Every ten miles or so the white blazes that mark the main trail would intersect with blue blazes leading off to roughly constructed but reliably leak-proof shelters hewn from logs. Usually the shelters sat near freshwater springs. Sometimes, on a stump beside the lean-to, or on one of the walls, you could find a tarnished plaque commemorating the Civilian Conservation Corps and describing the date of the shelter’s construction during the nineteen-thirties. For an adolescent in the confusing, materialistic suburbs of the nineteen-seventies, these shelters were powerful artifacts; they made credible and specific our school-book pages about Great Depression and its improvisational-jobs programs.

The article also compares the current stimulus to the New Deal, making mention of the 1930s Federal Writers Project. A short read, but very interesting.