Glory-June Greiff writes us from Indiana:
Pokagon’s original gatehouse, soon to be a CCC mini-museum with artifacts and displays.
Photo Credit: Glory-June Greiff Creative Commons
For 62 years, on the last Sunday in July, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) veterans have been coming to Indiana’s Pokagon State Park, in the far northeast corner of the state, for the oldest continuous CCC reunion in the country. Twenty years after the CCC was established in the depths of the Depression, the late Roger Woodcock, and others who had worked at Pokagon, sought the park’s help in setting up a reunion. Company 556, initially formed in the fall of 1933 for a camp at Indiana Dunes State Park on Lake Michigan, finished its work there (alas, virtually all gone today) and established Camp SP-7 at Pokagon the following year. Virtually all the park’s present landscaping and buildings–including the old gatehouse, the saddle barn, the dining hall and much of the group camp, the bath house, the beach itself, and overnight cabins near the inn–are the work of the CCC, which remained in the park until January 1942. Most of Pokagon State Park is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. I wrote that nomination in the 1990s at the behest of the CCC veterans.
There were two veterans present at this year’s July 26 reunion. (A third, bless him, had intended to come, but had a fall and couldn’t make it.) Interpretive naturalist Fred Wooley, who retired this spring after 35 years, returned to emcee the program. Fred has left a wonderful legacy: Among other projects, his cherished dream of marking the location of every building on the site where the CCC camp was, including interpretive signage for each, has been realized. And soon, the beautiful gatehouse built by these boys so long ago, later abandoned owing to changing traffic patterns, will become a mini museum dedicated to them. The legacy lives on.
Glory-June Greiff is a public historian, writer, and preservation activist based in Indianapolis. She began her research on the New Deal in Indiana over thirty years ago and continues to make new discoveries every year. In the early 1990s she served as statewide director of Indiana’s Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!) survey, which provided the foundation for her book Remembrance, Faith and Fancy: Outdoor Public Sculpture in Indiana (Indiana Historical Society, 2005). Her most recent publication is People, Parks, and Perceptions: A History and Appreciation of Indiana State Parks, which emphasizes the role of the CCC and WPA in developing our state parks and creating our public perception of how such a park should appear. A native of Hudson Lake in northern Indiana, Greiff earned a B.S. in Radio-Television/English from Butler University and worked several years on the air in radio; she holds a master’s degree in Public History from Indiana University. She is also a professional narrator and a performer of song and story.