Sunday, October 21, 2001
Abilene State Park honors builders
Historical marker recalls public projects,
tenacity of Civilian Conservation Corps that helped build America
By Bill Whitaker
Reporter-News Staff Writer
BUFFALO GAP — While some of the Civilian
Conservation Corps veterans who undertook massive public-work
projects in the 1930s remain among the living, none who helped
build Abilene State Park was around to be honored Saturday afternoon.
Little guesswork was required to deduce
why.
When Taylor County Historical Commission
members began researching the park’s May 10, 1934, opening,
they learned the first CCC camp set up in 1933 to build Abilene
State Park was made up of World War I veterans already approaching
middle age.
Some of them would be hovering around the
century mark if still living.
“Originally, when Franklin Roosevelt
formed the CCC in 1933, the idea was to give young men a job during
the Depression,” commission member Karen Turner said. “But
it was also to give veterans from World War I a job — and
some of them were already in their 30s and 40s.”
That fact aside, Saturday’s dedication
ceremony honoring CCC veterans who built Abilene State Park in
the early 1930s went ahead as planned, complete with the unveiling
of a state historical marker at the park, just southwest of Buffalo
Gap off Farm Road 89.
County historical commission president Jack
Holden even managed to find some aging CCC veterans for the occasion,
he said, “but none of them worked at Abilene State Park and
all of them were in the CCC a little later.”
Intended as a way of stimulating a down-and-out
economy through ambitious public-work projects during the Depression,
the CCC was primarily open to unemployed men between ages 18 and
25 who were unmarried and came from families on relief.
However, the sorry spectacle of World War
I veterans in dire straits during the Depression also weighed
heavily on President Roosevelt and the architects of the CCC,
so camps devoted entirely to veterans of that conflict were organized
as well.
Of the $30 each man was paid for a 40-hour
week, government requirements insisted $25 be sent back to his
family. Millions of men participated in the program, planting
3 billion trees, stocking 1 billion fish, constructing 46,854
bridges, fighting fires and constructing more than 800 state parks.
“It was a wonderful program,”
said 82-year-old Milton C. Cranfill of Abilene, a mess sergeant
in the CCC camp that labored on the park at Lake Brownwood. “The
men learned occupations, they learned skills, they learned how
to make a living.
“For me, I learned discipline —
and I also learned how to cook!”
Founded in 1933, the CCC continued until
1942 when the nation — by then thrust into World War II —
no longer faced rampant unemployment. Of the 56 parks the CCC
built in Texas, 31 are still in existence.
Accomplishments by the CCC were highlighted
during Saturday’s festive Pioneer Day observance at the park.
With admission fees waived, the park played host to everything
from old-time sack races to buffalo-chip tossing.
Taylor County Historical Commission members
began planning a historical marker for the park a few years ago.
State historical officials approved the local commission’s
plan only after suggesting it also pay homage to the park’s
CCC workers.
Abilene State Park was actually built by
two waves of CCC workers — the first largely made up of Anglo
World War I veterans, the second made up exclusively of veterans
of African descent. That second camp represented something of
a bonus to Abilene State Park backers.
“Originally, they were assigned to
work in Sweetwater,” Turner said of the black CCC contingent,
“but the people in Sweetwater didn’t want them, so city
officials in Abilene said, ‘We’ll be glad to take them!’”
The black CCC camp sprouted in 1935 and
made additional improvements to the park, including laying a walkway
around the swimming pool and constructing a tower. The group also
made inroads into the community through a singing quartet and
a baseball team.
During her research, Turner unearthed other
revelations about the park, including a squabble over the original
cornerstone laid there. Local officials wanted a pink marble cornerstone,
and even got one for a time.
However, federal officials insisted on a
rock indigenous to the area — and suddenly the pink cornerstone
was gone. Before the struggle reached rock-throwing proportions,
U.S. Rep. Thomas L. Blanton of Albany stepped in and settled the
dispute in favor of the pink marble cornerstone.
In addition, a time capsule was ceremoniously
placed near the cornerstone more than 65 years ago — one
reportedly containing a coin, an arrowhead, a brief history of
the park and a copy of the Abilene Reporter-News.
Contact story editor Bill Whitaker
at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com
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Copyright
©2001, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps.
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