Welcome to Vermont Civilian Conservation Corps History!

We tell the story of the Vermonters who are the alumni of the CCC from the 1930s.

The CCC was created by President Roosevelt in the spring of 1933 - almost immediately after he took office. Roosevelt was elected with a mandate to "do something" about the terrible unemployment of the Great Depression. In his famous "first 100 days" in office he enacted the "alphabet soup" of government programs designed to put Americans back to work. Of all these programs, the CCC was one that was closest to Roosevelt's personal passion for conservation - and the CCC earned the nickname "Roosevelt's Forest Army."

Vermont State Forester Perry Merrill was one of the first in the country to recognize the potential of the CCC. Within weeks of the creation of the program he had enlisted CCC crews to work on projects in Vermont. Eventually, Vermont had one of the greatest number of CCC Camps anywhere in the country.

The "CCC Boys" who worked at these camps went on to have long and varied lives. But many of them looked back on their CCC days as something valuable and special. As they grew older they began to tell the stories of those days more and more. Here are those stories . . .