Nurseries Sites

North Higgins Lake State Park near Roscommon MI is built on what was once the world's largest seedling nursery, established by the Michigan State Forester in 1903.   December 5, 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) established a camp at Higgins Lake, briefly on the Hanson Military Reservation and then on US-27 midway between Roscommon and Grayling. The camp operated from 1933-42, and a big part of the CCC activities was forest-related, planting trees and fighting forest fires across the northern part of the state.  The Higgins Lake tree nursery and CCC camp were central to this effort. By 1942, when the CCC ended,...

Great Smoky Mountains National Park occupies large areas of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. The park’s creation was a decades-long process, including advocacy in the late 19th century; legislation signed by President Calvin Coolidge in 1926; and donations and land acquisitions from small donors, the governments of North Carolina and Tennessee, and charitable organizations, such as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund. Once the park’s existence was firmly established, funding from the Public Works Administration (PWA) and labor from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) made it both accessible and accommodating to the public. President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the park on...

Around the turn of the 20th century, the Wasatch Mountain forests on federal lands were added to the national forest system and came under the supervision of the U.S. Forest Service.  The USFS began a process of reforestation in Big Cottonwood Canyon (among other areas), which had been completely denuded of trees in the 19th century to supply mines in the canyon, aqueducts and lumber for building Salt Lake City.  The Forest Service established a tree nursery at the site of the present Spruces Campground to supply seedlings for the reforestation effort. When the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) set up a...

The Stearns Davenport Heirloom Apple Orchard in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, is an unusual New Deal site: an ongoing collection of heritage apple trees. It is a true example of a "living New Deal." In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) used relief workers to cut down trees in abandoned apple orchards to control disease and pest outbreaks. That project was directed by Mr. Stearns Davenport, who worked for the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture. Davenport took advantage of the project to collect scions of old apple trees to preserve varieties that would otherwise be lost and forgotten. The collected scions were grafted onto...