Did you know that Bossier Parish had different Civilian Conservation Corps sites for nearly 10 years? To learn more about these camps, read this weeks article.
Th African American CCC Camps of Bossier Parish
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932, he promised the American people “a New Deal”. The New Deal became a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Roosevelt on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to pull the country out of the Great Depression. In the ‘alphabet soup’ of these novel programs, the letters that seem to be remembered with the most fondness are three letter C’s: the Civilian Conservation Corps.
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Company 3498, Barksdale Field, La. from Official Annual of District E, Fourth Corps Area, Civilian Conservation Corps, 1935 |
Even if none of these men were your ancestors or relatives, you’ve most likely reaped some benefits from the work of CCC’ers. If you’ve ever spent any time picnicking, hiking, swimming, fishing or otherwise recreating at a public area like a State or National Park, you’ve benefitted from the work of the CCC. In Shreveport-Bossier you’ve benefitted from improvements made to Barksdale Air Force Base facilities, flood protection, soil improvement, reforestation, and more access roads on base and elsewhere in the wooded areas of Bossier, Caddo and any other parishes. CCC camps were across the state in Louisiana. In Bossier, all of the camps were for African-American corpsmen, at the time known as the “Colored Civilian Conservation Corps, or four C’s.
The legislation that created the CCC expressly forbid discrimination on the basis of race yet the CCC was segregated in practice with little to no opposition from the officials that were supposed to uphold the law. In fact, Robert Fechner, Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, issued an order in 1935 to enforce the “complete segregation of colored and white enrollees.”
This order contradicted the U.S. Army’s conclusion that segregation would make finding locations for all-black camps difficult, especially in the South. To reduce outcry from white citizens, only white supervisors were put in charge of the camps and many of the 150 African-American CCC camps were built on remote federal lands away from the public. An oral history of a Louisiana CCC alumnus points to this practice when it tells of a black CCC camp being removed from Homer, Louisiana in Claiborne Parish to Barksdale Field, now Barksdale Air Force Base, in Bossier Parish, due to white Homer residents’ opposition. The Homer camp then became whites-only. The other remote African American CCC camps in Bossier were in the Haughton area and, later in the program, the Plain Dealing area.
The two CCC camps on Barksdale (Camp 3498 and 3499 of District E, Fourth Corps) were established in summer 1935 to improve the Barksdale Airfield’s land reservation, only three years after the establishment of the Barksdale Army Air Field (prior to the formation of the US Air Force in 1940) when so much of the 22,000-acre reservation was still largely inaccessible. The corpsmen first had to construct the buildings and build the roads and walkways of the camps themselves, from scratch. They then worked miles of gravel road, dirt roads, bridges, emergency landing fields, gun ranges, and fire preservation roads and fire breaks, plus drainages for the whole reservation.
An additional aim of the CCC camps was the education of its men, and according to the 1935 District E Annual, Camp 3499 offered grade school and high school coursework, plus classes and labs in floriculture and horticulture and a woodworking shop. For recreation, according to the annual, “any wholesome sport” was welcome. Popular in that camp were boxing, volleyball and baseball. “’Work hard, play hard’ seems to be the motto of the members of Company 3499, the yearbook entry concluded. Camp 3498’s entry boasted that in addition to sports, the camp has an orchestra, the average weight of enrollees increased twenty pounds in the camp’s first 60 days and that every man re-enrolled in October.
In the 1937 Annual, the 3498th company at Barksdale described its continuing projects to make the reservation more accessible, including more road improvements, setting up telephone lines and building dams for fishing ponds. The camp had the amenities of a sawmill to make use of the timber it cleared and had newly acquired electricity, especially helpful for the education program, allowing better light for the school building and saving labor in the camp kitchen. Camp life listed a chaplain that conducted semi-monthly religious services, plus pastors from the community would make the rounds to the camps. Sports were popular like baseball and basketball; the biggest competitors being Haughton and Keithville. Intramural sports offered more relaxing recreation, such as horse shoes and softball. The company garden was doing well, offering tomatoes, string beans, okra, cabbage, and radishes. In this edition of the annual, weight gain was not reported.
To be continued, with work and play in the Haughton and Plain Dealing CCC Camps. If you would like to see an original copy of the 1937 CCC District E Annual, including its many photographs of camp life, please visit us in the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center at 2206 Beckett Street, Bossier City. For fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, and @bplhistorycenter on TikTok,
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