Jim Brewer | Special to Ashland Times-Gazette
LOUDONVILLE − Camp Mohican, the local installment of more than 1,500 setups of what became known as “Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), left a lasting legacy to the area during the Great Depression, and was instrumental in making the nascent Mohican State Park into one of the most visited in Ohio.
Kenny Libben, curator of the Cleo Redd Fisher Museum, spoke Monday on that legacy in the closing 2022-23 entry in the Mohican Historical Society’s speaker series.
In an hour-long talk before about 80 jammed into the museum meeting room, Libben traced the operations of Camp Mohican from its opening in June 1933 to its eventual closing in April 1942, when the U.S. government decided to disband the remnants of the CCC and concentrate on the effort to fight World War II.
A blister fungus among us and copperhead snakes
The CCC was a child of the Depression, one of the promises Franklin D. Roosevelt made in his successful 1932 election campaign.
As part of the New Deal, Roosevelt took the CCC he had formed while governor in New York and applied it nationally. In New York, the CCC worked on outdoor projects involving reforestation and infrastructure in state parks and wilderness areas.
His CCC idea involved more than 1,500 camps set up nationwide, with approximately 200 workers in each.
“In an era of mass unemployment where Americans commonly went two or three days without a meal, thousands of workers were attracted,” Libben said, “to the promise of $30 a month wage, shelter, clothing, and three square meals a day.”
Camp Mohican was selected as a CCC camp location as part of a newly designated Ohio State Park. The state, Libben said, bought up about 500 acres near Clear Fork Gorge in 1928 as a future…
