CCC Camps in Bossier Parish, Part 3

Continued from March 16, 2022

The previous 2 weeks we explored the CCC camps on Barksdale Air Field and in Haughton, LA. Those camps were charged with improvements to the young military reservation at Barksdale, such as creating landing fields and roads out of wilderness and were categorized as “A” (for Army) camps and, in Haughton, were designated “SCS” for soil conservation on private agricultural land. This week, let’s look at the work and recreational life of the Plain Dealing camp.

In 1939, men from the 3498/C at Barksdale and a few from camp 3499/C of Haughton were transferred to a new camp at Plain Dealing in north Bossier Parish toward the Arkansas line. Their project number was P-81, the P designating it a forestry project on a private forest. Their company number remained 3498. 

Forestry and forest products were and are a valuable source of income for the state of Louisiana and Bossier Parish. It goes without saying, the need to protect Louisiana’s forests became a high priority. The U.S. Forest Service instructed that the CCC could work forestry projects on private lands that participated in the Clarke-McNary program, where landowners contributed two cents per acre annually to the Division of Forestry for fire protection. 

On the 14 forestry camps on private land in Louisiana, the projects worked toward forest fire protection using the latest science on the topic. Roads and fire breaks were constructed through the forest, fire hazards reduced, telephone lines constructed, and fire lookout towers were constructed. Sometimes the crews did actual firefighting. Overall, Louisiana’s CCC crews built 31 fire towers, 10 tower residences, 2,998 bridges, 2,142 miles of telephone lines, 63 cattle guards, and 3,070 miles of truck trails.  

In the History Center’s collection we have much less material on the Plain Dealing camp than on the Haughton and Barksdale camps to learn about camp activities. However, the nationwide newspaper for the CCC, Happy Days, shows that like all other CCC camps, recreational opportunities in Plain Dealing included many sports and Plain Dealing had strong representation in the District E “Negro Olympics.” In fact, the Plain Dealing camp won the 1939 volleyball championship, defeating Saucier, Mississippi. Louisiana CCC companies were established within District E of the Fourth Corps Area of the U.S. Army, which included Louisiana and the southwestern portion of Mississippi.

On July 11, 1940 The Bossier Banner praised the efforts of the Civilian Conservation Corps. “Here in Bossier Parish we have had several CCC Camps in the past few years.  We regret that the last is now being moved from Bellevue to some other section.” The editor delineated the continued needs he saw for CCC work in Bossier, which called on greatly expanding much of the same type of military base improvement, soil conservation, and forestry work already conducted by Bossier’s CCC camps.

When World War II began and the draft went into operation, Congress voted to close the CCC program as the need for work relief declined. Nevertheless, the benefits of the CCC continued on through the War. Capt. J.E. Kidd, a staff officer in the CCC program at Camp Beauregard in Louisiana who served with distinction as a colonel in Europe during World War II, often acknowledged the role the CCC played in the Allied victory. He stated that the CCC had prepared the men physically and mentally for the dangers and hardships imposed by war, and their CCC experience helped them qualify in a variety of military specialties. 

To learn more about CCC Camps in Bossier and surrounding parishes, please visit us in the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center at 2206 Beckett Street, Bossier City. If you have any information, stories or photos about the Bossier Parish CCC Camps, we would love to see them or to copy them, with permission, to add to the History Center’s research collection. For other fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok

Photo: Sports page in the Sept. 16, 1939 issue of  Happy Days – The Weekly Newspaper of the Civilian Conservation Corps, detailing the first Negro CCC Olympics between Mississippi and Louisiana teams  (District “E” of 4^th Corps Area) and Company 3498 of Plain Dealing’s championship win in volleyball.

Article by: Pam Carlisle

CCC Camps in Bossier Parish, Part 2

 Continued from March 9, 2022

Civilian Conservation Corps, Company 4407 of Haughton, La. from the Official Annual of CCC District E, Fourth Corps Area, 1935

Last week we explored the CCC camps on Barksdale Air Field. Those camps were charged with improvements to the young military reservation, such as creating landing fields and roads out of wilderness and were categorized as “A” (for Army) camps. Though all the Bossier Camps had Barksdale Army Airfield as their officially designated camp location, there were also camps off the Army reservation in Haughton and in Plain Dealing. Let’s look at the work and recreational life of the Haughton camp.

The Haughton CCC camp’s work mission was designated as an “SCS” camp for the new Soil Conservation Service in 1935 when it was established in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This was the era famously known as the “Dust Bowl” days of windblown topsoil drifting from the western great plains across eastern U.S., an extreme demonstration of the soil erosion crisis that also existed on Louisiana farms.

The Bossier SCS company, number 4407/C, was comprised of young men from Louisiana and Florida. The SCS-sponsored camps worked in demonstration projects on private farms to implement scientific principles and practices to improve soil conservation methods, controlling erosion on as much agricultural land as possible. The projects were supervised by the local landowners. This arrangement allowed for Federal assistance toward conservation activities without Federal control, which was especially important in Louisiana, a latecomer among states in welcoming the CCC.

Much of the work in the Haughton camp was digging the drainage ditches as well as contouring the land according to these scientific principles. Ms. Meverlean Moore from the nearby community of Princeton described their work in oral history interviews:

“All this [private] land back here, they would keep all the underbrush cut. And they laid terraces where the forest could hold moisture for the trees. And they had dips where they dipped cows in the oil to keep the ticks off them. Then the cows would roam all in the woods everywhere but the old ticks wouldn’t get on them. Those pretty berry vines, we would just all go over there and pick berries because there was no underbrush. But they only did that on the Sandidge place. They did not do that on other places, because Sandidge is the one that let them build that camp. They had a CCC pond that is still back there.”

She also remembered another advantage to the camp that helped her family eat better: “during the CCC camp my stepfather got acquainted with the cook at the camp, it was right there on Highway 80 and he would hang around in the kitchen with the cook and he would give him gallon buckets of sausage and whole sticks of bologna and a lot of little things [that] would help out at home.” In addition to berries and plenty of cured meat to eat, the Haughton camp had fresh vegetables from bountiful gardens that the young men planted. They were the pride of the camp and one of the first spots shown to visitors. According to the 1937 District Annual, the Haughton camp overwhelmingly won official competitions as the best garden.

The most significant contribution of the Haughton CCC camp to Ms. Moore’s life, perhaps, is that she married one of the CCC young men, who was from Tennessee. Anecdotally, it was not uncommon for young women in local communities to see marriage to a CCC out-of-towner as a way out of their own small town. Ms. Meverlean remembered, the CCC “pay was $20.00 to the young man and $20.00 to [his] parents to help them out. So after we got married, we lived out of $20.00 dollars but the other $20.00 had to keep going to his parents. Then the baby came along, but we still lived [on that $20.00 but] … $2.50 would buy everything you would need because everything else was in the garden.”

Another purpose of the CCC camps was education for the young men. Their work schedule left time for academic class room instruction, with the elimination of illiteracy being the foremost goal and each member being able to sign their name to payroll as the first objective. Coursework toward a diploma was also provided at the camp. There was time for time “off” too, though recreation could be serious business. The camp had its own volleyball and basketball courts and competed in sports, its chief competitors the African American camps on Barksdale and Keithville in neighboring Caddo Parish.

The young men of the Haughton camp also learned first aid. Being by the important U.S. Highway 80 the camp became essentially a first aid station for the public, and provided medical assistance following highway accidents. For the men’s own medical needs, each camp had a medical doctor. The camp’s most serious setback was an influenza epidemic in 1936 that sent 60 enrollees to bed at one time and killed 5 men. A mumps outbreak later that year sent as many as 33 to bed at one time but thankfully did not result in any deaths.

To learn more about CCC Camps in Bossier and surrounding parishes, please visit us in the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center at 2206 Beckett Street, Bossier City. If you have any information, stories or photos about the Bossier Parish CCC Camps, we would love to see them or to copy them, with permission, to add to the History Center’s research collection. For other fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok,

Article by: Pam Carlisle

The African American CCC Camps of Bossier Parish

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. 

Company 3498, Barksdale Field, La.

from Official Annual of District E,

Fourth Corps Area,

 Civilian Conservation Corps, 1935

  From 1933-1942, the CCC operated to provide relief to families with young unmarried men who had difficulty finding jobs. Through this program, residential manual labor jobs that implemented a  natural resource conservation program could be found in every state and territory.  From their monthly wage of $30, the participating young men were obligated to send $25 home to their families.                                                                                                                  

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, 

Article by: Pam Carlisle