Utahns still benefit from 1930s work corps

Man-made lakes like the one at Camp Kiesel near Ogden allow Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts to learn water sports in a controlled environment. Bryan White, a Scout leader from Farmington, spent a day on the lake with young boys in almost a dozen boats giving them their first lessons in rowing.

"Anything with water, Cub Scouts love," he said. "It's a very clean lake and well-maintained."

That lake was built about seven decades ago by a group of young men escaping poverty and hopelessness in the Civilian Conservation Corps — one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal alphabet programs.

Many of the corps projects are still serving communities — especially in southern Utah, Tooele, northeast Utah County and Davis County. In Farmington, Centerville and Bountiful horizontal terraces can be seen near the tops of the Wasatch peaks that were cut by the corps and are still keeping those cities safe from mud slides.

On March 31, 1933, Congress and Roosevelt approved a huge program to employ some of the millions of jobless young men across the country recently out of high school in doing forest conservation work, an issue close to the president's heart.

For the past 75 years Utahns have benefited from the work that in many ways saved 1930s Utah and set a framework for success in the future.

Looking back, historians agree the plan was genius. At the time, many senators from the West were suspicious of 18- and 19-year-olds from the East coming out to manage public lands, said Joel Briscoe, a community historian and teacher at Bountiful High School. But times were desperate. Utah's unemployment rate was the fourth highest in the nation at more than 33 percent. An influx of federal money was needed.

Six weeks later work began on Utah's first camp in American Fork Canyon. Over the next nine years 116 camps, many seasonal, popped up in 27 of the state's 29 counties, providing jobs to locals and cash for the men to spend in town.

"They'd build camps, work on a project, then move on. Those who worked in the camps weren't necessarily from Utah, but (it) was a great way for young men to gain employment during the Depression," said Paul Reeve, historian and assistant professor at the U.

But more than money was given to the state. The corps' work curbed flooding and erosion in the mountains, improved rangelands for ranchers, killed crickets for farmers, built more than 4,000 miles of new roads and provided hiking trails, campgrounds and other recreational facilities for Utah residents. Almost as important, the camps, equipment and staff of the corps created an infrastructure for the war effort, making it easy to mobilize combat-ready troops soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor.