Civilian Conservation Corps
Lewis Township, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
In March 1933, the federal government created the CCC to combat the Great Depression. During nine years, the CCC enrolled some 3,000,000 youths nationwide--including 194,572 men at 114 camps in Pennsylvania. Members of the 367th CCC company first arrived here, May 30, 1933. Here arose camp S-126, which became home to hundreds of men before it closed in 1936. Many of its members then went to Camp S-145 near Montoursville.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In March 1933, at the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government created the Civilian Conservation Corps to put young men to work on the nation's forests and public lands. Over nine years the CCC enrolled some three million youths nationwide, including nearly 195,000 across 114 camps in Pennsylvania. The 367th company arrived at this Lycoming County site on May 30, 1933, establishing Camp S-126, which housed hundreds of men until it closed in 1936.
Why it matters
The CCC was one of the New Deal's most enduring achievements, combining Depression relief with conservation work whose forests, trails, and parks Americans still enjoy today.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To understand this quiet patch of Pennsylvania forest, picture the spring of 1933. The country was three and a half years into the Great Depression, the worst economic collapse in American history. Banks had failed, farms had gone under, and something like a quarter of the workforce had no job at all. For young men just coming of age, the future looked like a locked door — no work, no wages, and families that could no longer feed them.
Into that grim landscape stepped a brand-new federal program. In March 1933, in the opening weeks of a new administration, the government created the Civilian Conservation Corps to do two things at once: put idle young men to work, and heal land that decades of logging, fire, and erosion had worn down.
Pennsylvania, with its vast cutover forests and mountain watersheds, was fertile ground for the idea. The Commonwealth became home to scores of camps, and this corner of Lycoming County was one of them — a place where the national emergency and the local woods met.
People & events
The story here is not about a famous name but about hundreds of ordinary ones. On the last day of May 1933 — barely ten weeks after the CCC was created — the young men of the 367th company arrived at this site and began to build their own home in the woods.
That home was Camp S-126. Its enrollees lived in barracks, ate in a mess hall, answered to a daily routine, and went out to work on the surrounding forest land. They were part of an enormous national enterprise: over its nine years the Corps enrolled roughly three million young men, and tens of thousands of them passed through Pennsylvania's camps alone.
Camp S-126 was busy but not permanent. It housed hundreds of men before it closed in 1936, and many of those who had worked here simply moved on to another camp nearby, carrying their tools and their routines to the next stretch of land that needed them. The camp closed; the work it represented did not.
Its place in the American story
The Civilian Conservation Corps became one of the New Deal's most beloved and lasting achievements, and it is easy to see why. It answered a desperate question — what do we do with a generation of young men with no work? — in a way that left something standing long after the checks stopped.
Across the country, Corps members planted trees by the hundreds of millions, fought fires, built trails and bridges and shelters, and laid the groundwork for parks and forests that Americans still enjoy today. The wages the young men earned were mostly sent straight home to their families, so a single enrollee's work rippled out to support parents and siblings through the hardest years.
That is the national thread running through this Pennsylvania clearing. A camp like S-126 was a single stitch in a continent-spanning effort to keep a generation working and to repair the land at the same time — relief and conservation braided into one idea.
If you visit
Come here expecting quiet. The barracks, the mess hall, and the bustle of a few hundred young men are long gone, and what remains is mostly the setting itself: the kind of Pennsylvania woodland the Corps existed to tend. Let the marker do the work of populating the scene in your imagination.
Stand for a moment and think about the distances involved — young men who had never left their home counties, sent to live and work in the forest, building the very camp they would sleep in. The landscape you see around you is the real monument; the trees and slopes are the work itself.
If you're building a road trip, this pairs naturally with any of Pennsylvania's state forests and parks, many of which still bear the fingerprints of Corps labor. Reading this marker first gives you a lens for the rest of the day: once you know what to look for, you start seeing the Corps's quiet handiwork everywhere in the woods.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related events
- · Great Depression
- · New Deal
- · Civilian Conservation Corps
Themes & tags
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