This is a reprint of a “From the Local History Room” column that first appeared in February 2012, before the launch of this weblog.
Civilian Conservation Corps put men back to work during the Great Depression
By Jared Olar
Library Assistant
During the economic hard times of about a decade ago, it was common to refer to those troubles as “the Great Recession,” a name that recalls the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although a large number of people lost jobs and homes beginning in 2008, those hardships nevertheless paled in comparison to those of the Depression years, when the federal government implemented many programs to address the widespread suffering.
One of those programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps, a work recovery program coordinated through the U.S. Army. At a time when jobs were so scarce that hundreds or even thousands of men would wait in line for hours to apply for two available jobs, the CCC employed young men all across the country in conservation and land improvement projects.
The army organized the workers into companies which would dwell in camps located in the counties where their labor was needed. CCC camps in our area included the 1623rd Company in Havana. Another company was based in Manito, while Pekin was the home of the 693rd Company. Pekin’s CCC barracks, which housed 157 young men, were located in Soldwedel’s Addition on Second Street, just south of Lakeside Cemetery where Lakeside Apartments later were built. The camp opened in 1936.
Former Pekin CCC members shared their experiences of those times in two newspaper articles from 1996 and 1997 on file in the Pekin Public Library’s Local History Room. One man recalled that, as a program administered by the U.S. Army, naturally it was much like being in the Army. Corpsmen “wore olive drab clothing supplied by the Army, ate Army food and were even treated by an Army doctor,” and the barracks had to be kept in tip-top shape.
Corpsmen were paid $30 a month for work such as cutting trees from levees to clear the way for the new lock and dam by Creve Coeur, or soil conservation projects such as planting hundreds of black locust trees on Creve Coeur hill. Their projects were literally “shovel-ready” – they did all their work by hand, using shovels, wheelbarrows, axes and saws.
Pictures and recollections of Pekin’s CCC camp also are featured in “Pekin: A Pictorial History” (p.164), which includes this memory of an anonymous CCC worker:
“What did we do at those camps? Our group dug a lot of ditches, built culverts and did fertilizing for farmers. Although I lived in Pekin I didn’t have a car: there was no way for me to get back and forth so we stayed in the barracks. Besides the food was pretty good. Especially for the Depression. I also remember some of the boys working in town. Every single morning they’d come out with their big pushcarts and wire brooms and start scrubbing down the streets. We all took a lot of pride in a job well done, and, let me tell you, those streets were so clean you could have eaten off them.”