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Physical labor in the outdoors tends to build up an appetite, so the young men from Rochester stationed with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Finland, Minnesota, were no doubt most pleased with one component of the camp kitchen: the Dutch oven.
“Apple pie was perhaps the most appreciated item on the menu,” the camp’s captain told the Post-Bulletin in July 1933.
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The dinner menu included fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, but the pies baked in that oven were the real treat for the 200 boys working at this camp in the woods on Minnesota’s North Shore.
That summer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s youth employment project, created only months earlier, was already up and running in Minnesota. From 1933 until the program was closed down in 1945, 70,000 young men lived and worked at 145 CCC camps in Minnesota. In southeastern Minnesota, camps were established at Lanesboro, Lake City, Whitewater State Park, Rochester, Plainview, Caledonia and Chatfield.
Unemployed men, ages 18 to 25, were put to work on construction projects, including road-building, parkland improvements, flood control and forestry. They were paid a monthly wage of $30, of which $25 was sent home to their families.
The CCC was perhaps the most popular of all the New Deal programs created to battle the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, when there were threats to trim funding for the CCC in 1938, the Post-Bulletin editorialized that the program “has done much valuable work for the country and at the same time has been the salvation of hundreds of thousands of boys who otherwise might have come to the dead end.”
There was much excitement in June of 1933, when the first 170 young men arrived at the CCC camp being constructed on the Olmsted County fairgrounds. On their first days, the Post-Bulletin reported, the recruits were kept busy improving the grounds and installing water and sanitation facilities.
At the Chatfield camp, the men began work almost immediately on their summer project: building a swimming area in the Root River. “Scores of recruits are removing rock from the river bed and using them to create the dam,” the Post-Bulletin said.
But there was an unfortunate and shameful cloud over all the good feelings: Black men were clearly not welcome at most camps and communities in the state. Already in July 1933, Black recruits were transferred from the CCC camp near Preston. “They were moved to two camps to which colored recruits had been sent previously,” the Post-Bulletin reported.
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Most Blacks enrolled in the CCC in Minnesota were eventually stationed at Fort Snelling or at Temperance River State Park, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. “Those sent to white camps lived in segregated barracks and ate their meals apart from the rest of the recruits,” a report by the historical society states.
This was clearly against the established intentions of the CCC. But, the society notes, “Ignoring the program’s integration requirements, administrators stopped accepting Blacks into Minnesota camps in 1938.” Blacks already enrolled in Minnesota camps at that point were sent to Missouri, where Jim Crow laws were in effect.
Despite that obviously disgraceful step, there can be no denying the otherwise positive accomplishments of the CCC across the state. Young men who would otherwise have been on the dole — or worse — provided communities, state parks and agricultural areas with long-lasting enhancements.
They earned their slice of apple pie.
Thomas Weber is a former Post Bulletin reporter who enjoys writing about local history.
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