Laurel Hill State Park
Jefferson Township, Somerset County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
One of five Recreational Demonstration Areas created in Pa. by the National Park Service during the Great Depression to improve land use. Between 1935 and 1941, workers from the CCC and WPA New Deal programs built roads, buildings, and sites here to support many types of recreation. Laurel Hill is the most intact RDA in Pa., retaining examples of all of its original property types. The park continues its legacy of conservation begun in 1935.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Laurel Hill was one of five Recreational Demonstration Areas the National Park Service created in Depression-era Pennsylvania to reclaim worn land for public use. Between 1935 and 1941, workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration built the roads, cabins, and facilities that turned the site into a place for recreation. Today it is the most intact RDA in the state, still holding examples of every kind of structure the New Deal builders left behind.
Why it matters
The park is a living record of how New Deal work programs put the unemployed to labor rebuilding the land, creating public spaces Americans still enjoy generations later.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The 1930s were the hungriest years America had known. The Great Depression threw millions out of work, and at the same time much of the country's land was worn thin — over-farmed, eroded, logged out. In the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania, land that had been cut over and hard-used sat idle while men who wanted work could not find any. The nation faced two problems at once: exhausted people and exhausted ground.
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal answered by putting the two problems to work on each other. If the land needed rebuilding and men needed jobs, then the government would pay the men to rebuild the land. Out of that logic came a wave of federal programs — among them the effort to turn marginal, worn-out acreage into something the public could use and enjoy.
Somerset County's Laurel Highlands, with its ridges and cool forests, was exactly the kind of place this thinking targeted. Here the federal government designated one of five Recreational Demonstration Areas in Pennsylvania: experiments meant to show how poor land could be reclaimed and reborn as public recreation ground.
People & events
Between 1935 and 1941, the work at Laurel Hill was carried out by two of the New Deal's signature programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps enrolled young men, housed them in camps, and set them to conservation labor — planting, building, and shaping the landscape. The Works Progress Administration put still more of the unemployed to work on construction and public projects. Together their hands built the roads, buildings, and recreational sites that made the area usable.
The National Park Service guided the vision. Recreational Demonstration Areas were its idea of how to convert struggling land into public good, and the workers gave that idea physical form beam by beam and mile by mile. What had been worn ground became a place designed for families to come and rest.
What sets Laurel Hill apart today is how completely that work survives. It is described as the most intact of Pennsylvania's five Recreational Demonstration Areas, still holding examples of every one of its original property types. Where time and redevelopment erased the others' features, here the full New Deal blueprint remains legible on the ground.
Its place in the American story
The New Deal did more than hand out relief; it built things that Americans still use. Roads, trails, cabins, shelters, and whole parks across the country came from the CCC and WPA, and generations who never knew the Depression have hiked and camped on their labor. Laurel Hill is one working piece of that vast inheritance.
The Recreational Demonstration Area program carried a particular idea: that recreation was not a luxury but a public need, and that even land written off as ruined could serve it. Many such areas were eventually handed over to states to become parks — a direct pipeline from Depression-era experiment to the state park systems we take for granted now.
Because Laurel Hill kept so much of its original fabric, it functions as a rare, honest record of how that transformation actually looked. It lets visitors see not just the finished park but the philosophy behind it: put the idle to work, heal the land, and leave something behind for everyone.
If you visit
Come here for the trees and the quiet, but look closer at the built things around you. The rustic style of the older structures — the stonework, the heavy timber, the way buildings settle into the landscape rather than dominate it — is the New Deal aesthetic, and much of it dates to those 1935–1941 years. You are looking at handwork from the Depression.
The park still lives out the conservation mission it was given in 1935, so a visit fits naturally into a Laurel Highlands road trip built around forest, water, and mountain air. Give yourself time to walk rather than just drive through; the workmanship reveals itself at a walking pace.
As you go, keep in mind that nearly everything here was made by people who badly needed the work and by a government that decided their labor should outlast the crisis that created it. That knowledge changes how a simple picnic shelter or trail feels underfoot.
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
- · New Deal
- · Civilian Conservation Corps
- · Works Progress Administration
Themes & tags
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