One night in August of 2019 when I was running searches on newspapers.com I came across an article in the Escanaba Daily Press from April 28,1934 that mentioned my maternal grandfather. It said that my grandfather, Lewis Maynard, was among thirty-four young men from Delta County, Michigan who were selected for service in the Civilian Conservation Corps, otherwise known as the CCC. The article stated that the men left Escanaba the day before, on April 27th, headed to Camp Custer near Battle Creek, Michigan "for conditioning, and then to be assigned to CCC camps."
Grandpa Lew grew up in Delta County, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a town called Nahma where his mother Amelia lived nearly all her life and where his parents made their home for all but a few years following their marriage in 1891.
His parents, Louis and Amelia, were French Canadian immigrants from Quebec. They immigrated to the Upper Peninsula as children in the early 1880s. Louis' family settled in nearby Escanaba, while Amelia's family found themselves in Nahma.
Grandpa Lew was born in Nahma on August 21, 1916. He was the 12th of thirteen children. And in April of 1934 when the article appeared in the Escanaba Daily Press, he was 17 years old. Just the right age to be enrolled in the CCC.
The circumstances that led young men to enroll in the CCC were reflective of the times. The Great Depression began in 1929 with the crash of the stock market in October of that year. It was the longest and worst economic downturn in U.S. history lasting a decade.
In the middle of this terrible period, newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the CCC in 1933 as part of the New Deal. The CCC was meant to be a means to provide training and employment for struggling young men and at the same time to provide a much-needed workforce to develop and improve public resources like state parks and federal forest lands. The CCC was active from 1933 through 1942.
The National Archives' Prologue Magazine, in the fall of 2006, contained an article about the first year of the CCC in 1933 that helps us understand the enormity of the CCC program. It said that:
They came from all over America—from the big cities, from the small towns, from the farms—tens of thousands of young men, to serve in the vanguard of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the spring of 1933.
They were the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps. They opted for long days and hard, dirty work, living in quasi-military camps often far from home in the nation's publicly owned forests and parks. But they earned money to send back to their needy families, received three square meals a day, and escaped from idle purposelessness by contributing to the renewal and beautification of the country.
By the time the CCC program ended as the nation was entering World War II, more than 2.5 million men had served in more than 4,500 camps across the country. The men had planted over 3 billion trees, combated soil erosion and forest fires, and occasionally dealt with natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts.
To be accepted into the CCC a young man had to be single, unemployed, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, at least sixty inches tall and weighing more than 107 pounds. They were paid $30 a month and were required to send $22 to $25 of their monthly allowance home to their family.
Lodging, meals, clothing, medical and dental services were provided. They were also given educational opportunities such as classes in forestry, spelling, English, mechanics and even art depending on the camp.
In Grandpa' Lew's case, his family story took a sad turn just six months before the infamous stock market crash of October 1929. On April 20th, his father Louis suddenly passed away. Louis was a Master Mechanic at the Bay De Noc Lumber Company's mill in Nahma and prior to his death the family appears to have been rather comfortable and well regarded.
We don't know exactly how the family managed after Louis' untimely death in April of 1929. Relatives who were children at that time told my mom that Lew's mother Ameila struggled financially, and that emotionally she never fully recovered from her husband's death.
So, while I am still exploring our family history during that period, what we do know for sure is that five years after his father's death, by the spring of 1934 at the midway point of the Great Depression, Grandpa Lew was qualified to enroll in the CCC. Meaning he was experiencing desperate financial times.
With all of this history in mind, I knew I wanted to find out more about Grandpa Lew's time in the CCC. But as genealogy research goes - the issue was added to my long "to do" list and there it sat.
Then on June 17, 2021, I submitted a request for records to the federal government's National Archives & Records Administration (NARA). Eleven months later, on May 24, 2022, I received an email from NARA saying that they had located Grandpa Lew's CCC records and that I would receive them after payment of a $25 fee. I paid the fee on May 26th. On June 15, 2022, almost exactly a year after my request was submitted to NARA, I received Grandpa Lew's CCC records via email. Just a reminder that genealogy often takes time!
The records I received from NARA included Grandpa Lew's application, selection certification, record of service, medical records, and discharge papers. A total of five pages, portions of which I have included in this blog post.
The records show that Grandpa Lew's CCC experience took him on a journey across Michigan.
He left home on the day of his application, April 27, 1934, and stopped first at CCC Camp Steuben located in Schoolcraft County, Michigan on the Upper Peninsula about forty miles away. He had a physical at Camp Steuben that same day.
The records do not indicate if he spent the night at Camp Steuben, but they do show that by April 30th he was at Camp Custer near Battle Creek, Michigan where he had a more extensive physical and received his first doses of the typhoid/paratyphoid and smallpox vaccines.
He remained at Camp Custer for conditioning until May 4th when he was transferred to his assigned station, Camp Hoxeyville near Cadillac, Michigan as part of the 679th Company of the CCC.
The record of his initial physical examination shows that he was 65 1/2 inches tall and weighed 125 pounds (with some discrepancy in these numbers on the second exam). He no longer had his wisdom teeth, and his eyesight was 20/20.
One of the first things I noticed in Grandpa Lew's CCC records was that he only served a few months, during the spring and early summer of 1934. He was honorably discharged on July 9, 1934, to take other employment and he was transported back to Nahma.
His short duration in the CCC dashed my hopes of finding a trove of information about my grandfather. I was hoping to find information about specific CCC projects he worked on, buildings he helped construct, trades and skills he may have learned, or other tidbits of his life in the CCC. (I understand that enrollees who stayed in service longer have more extensive files.)
That said, there are some interesting facts to be gleaned from his records. For instance, Grandpa Lew indicated on his application that he was educated through the 11th grade. Our relatives told my mom years ago that they knew Lew had left school before graduation but did not know why. Given that he was just seventeen upon entering the CCC in the spring of 1934, I am curious to know if he left school to join CCC?
His application shows that he had been unemployed since March 1934, not all that long before he submitted his application to the Delta County Emergency Welfare Relief Commission on April 27, 1934.
You can also see from his application materials that it was his mother Amelia that he designated to receive the required family allotment. He sent her the maximum of $25 out of his $30 per month earnings.
His record of service gives us a glimpse of the type of work he did while serving in the CCC. It shows that while at Camp Hoxeyville, he was assigned reforestation work.
Reforestation was one of the primary objectives of the CCC camps in Michigan to address the already cut over and depleted forest lands in the state. A representative of the Huron-Manistee National Forests told me in an email on July 19, 2022, that: "The 1934 CCC crew from Camp Hoxeyville performed timber survey, fire hazard abatement, road/trail construction, telephone line construction, and conservation projects that would have included actions like stream bank stabilization." These activities would have been consistent with the preparation for and accomplishment of reforestation on the national forest lands.
A more detailed list of the work at Camp Hoxeyville can be found in the documents linked below and available for download. One document says that at Camp Hoxeyville "possibly the greatest undertaking was the preparation of ground and the planting of trees in the barren Kellog Tract. 6,659 acres were furrowed and scalped and 2,249 acres were planted to Norway and Jack Pine. An average of 1,050 trees were planted per acre."
So, what was day-to-day life like at Camp Hoxeyville? The best I can tell is from a description found on "The CCC in Michigan" webpage presented by the Michigan History Center:
An enrollee's day began with reveille at it 6:00 A.M. After calisthenics came breakfast. CCC food was plain, nourishing and served in abundant quantities. CCC Director Fechner described camp food as "wholesome, palatable, and of the variety that sticks to the ribs." After breakfast, enrollees policed the grounds and barracks before roll call and inspection. By 7:45 A.M. the men were on their way to their work projects. Lunch was served in the field and lasted one hour. By 4:00 P.M. the men had returned to camp for an informal recreation period that lasted until dinner, which was served at 5:30. After dinner, enrollees either attended classes or sought entertainment in nearby communities. There were no restrictions about leaving camp in the evening as long as the men were back for lights out at 10:00 P.M
The full webpage with additional interesting information about the CCC in Michigan is linked below along with other CCC resources.
Unfortunately, Camp Hoxeyville where Grandpa Lew was stationed only operated from late 1933 through 1936 when it was decommissioned. As a result, it is difficult to find information about the camp online. I contacted numerous historical organizations, newspapers, and government entities looking for records and photographs without a lot of luck until I happened to contact the United States Forest Service.
Camp Hoxeyville was located in the Manistee National Forest, now the Huron-Manistee National Forests. They kindly searched their files and found two historic documents about Camp Hoxeyville, which they provided to me. Both documents include interesting details about the camp and a few pictures (albeit very bad quality pictures).
One of the records says that at Camp Hoxeyville
"179 men shared the barren wilderness with six barracks, a mess hall and kitchen, a storeroom, a garage, a bathhouse, two latrines, a pump house, a dispensary, one headquarters building, and a Forest Service garage."
From this description it sounds like life at Camp Hoxyeville in 1934 was both a challenge and a blessing for the enrollees who would otherwise be unemployed in a time of great economic upheaval. Wouldn't I dearly love to know what my grandfather thought of the camp and his time in the CCC?
My intent in this post is not to exhaustively detail the CCC in Michigan or Camp Hoxeyville. I chose to research these topics, as most genealogists would, to better understand the life experience of my grandfather as a CCC enrollee. It is always important to know the context and social history surrounding our ancestors' lives.
However, once I got started researching Camp Hoxeyville, I realized that there is very little information about the camp readily available. As a result, I decided to provide the two records I obtained from the Huron-Manistee National Forests as downloads available at the links below. Hopefully, others researching Camp Hoxeyville in the future will find these records useful.
Finally, the last little piece of the puzzle that I have given up on for now is the camp newspaper. Camp Hoxeyville had a newspaper called the "U Name It," later renamed "Hoxeyville Daze." I have sought out research help from different sources to try and locate editions of the paper from the spring and summer of 1934 in hopes of finding a mention of my grandfather. But so far to no avail. If I happen to ever get access to the Camp Hoxeyville newspaper from that period, I will update this post.
For additional information about the history of the CCC in Michigan check out these websites all of which I found informative:
For requesting an ancestor's CCC Records from NARA click this link:
For the records I received from the Huron-Manistee National Forest on CCC Camp Hoxeyville click these pdfs to download: