Havilah CCC Camp – Havilah CA

Description

"This camp was established in 1933/34 in the Havilah area on Forest Service land. The CCC camp location was coordinated with Frank Cunningham (Forest Supervisor) to establish a camp near Havilah…

The camp was established with orders to have an 80' warehouse, a guard station, ranger station and other various buildings built. We have a list from July 13, 1935 of individuals who worked in the Havilah and Bodfish camps or area…

Today the only surviving structure is the warehouse which is used as the garage both for fire engine 45 and the Breckenridge hotshot crew at Havilah. Across the road and to the south of this standing structure we found the remains of the original CCC camp built during the 1930's.

The camp is no longer there but the remains of foundations, depressions, and piping with artifacts still are. We set about recording these and came across a total of 25 different features. These consisted of latrines, root cellars, foundations of buildings with steps, walls and pits. One of our structures is the Dining Hall/Recreation Hall. This has a complete side stair case of rock and cement with retaining wall on the east side. An entrance of similar dimension is on the north side with the remnants of a main fire place in background and smaller interior side fireplace on the right. These foundations are interesting and unique for they were made to stand the test of time as we see here. Another structure we called the Administration Hall has a large three step entrance way…

The last structure to mention out of the numerous features is the boiler room . This is a flat concrete foundation with side walls of broken granite spread out on the sides. Walls of milled wood were originally installed as confirmed by milled wood we found along the sides. The foundation has a central drain and boiler foundation in the middle portion of the structure. An interesting note; we found inscriptions, prints and paint on the cement after 75 years."

– Mark L. Howe, Archeologist, Kern River Ranger District, Sequoia National Forest