Shiloh National Military Park Improvements – Savannah TN

Description

Beginning in 1934, 400 African American WWI veterans were employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to participate in restoration of the Civil War battlefield.

As Timothy Smith writes in “Black Soldiers and the CCC at Shiloh National Military Park”: “Among the chief beneficiaries of the New Deal’s job creation programs were Shiloh and other national parks, to which thousands of laborers were sent to construct, rehabilitate, and restore. In the case of Shiloh, the Civil Works Administration (CWA) employed several hundred local men from Hardin and McNairy counties on erosion control projects, road maintenance, and excavations at Shiloh’s Indian mounds. The Public Works Administration (PWA) also provided money for new visitor, employee, and administrative facilities and funded several writers who studied and wrote about Shiloh’s history. The Bureau of Public Roads surveyed the park and funded road modernization projects. By far, however, the CCC was the dominant New Deal program at Shiloh.

CCC members “performed a variety of jobs in the park, including roadwork, erosion control, landscaping, forestry management, and fire prevention. The workers streamlined drainage in the park and the national cemetery, building small dams at strategic locations to prevent erosion. At the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston death site, they built 96 dams. They also filled in and beautified an eroded area called ‘Dead Man’s Gravel Pit,’ which was so named because of a rockslide that had killed three workers in 1899. They created a test area in Rea Field on Shiloh Branch for experimenting with new methods of erosion control and new types of wood and stone dams.”