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Camp Morton as it looked in 1934.

Charles Libby stands next to sign near former CCC Camp Morton. This sign was recently donated by John Eastlake, Brian Farr, and Rob Barbour.

Charles Libby wiped a tear from his eye when recalling his final day spent as a “CCC Boy”.

He had to drive home to Williamsport that rainy morning so that he could help his father repair damage being caused by floodwaters inundating his boyhood home.

That final day in March 1936 ended his 2 1/2 years at Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Morton, which was located on what is now State Game Lands 13 in Sullivan County.

“They were the best years of my life,” he told a packed crowd at the Brass Pelican restaurant in Elk Grove, near the site of the former camp.

The Reforestation Relief Act was passed by Congress on March 31, 1933, as part of newly-elected president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative at the height of the Great Depression. It created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to provide work immediately for 250,000 young men in reforestation, road construction and developing national parks.

The program aimed to alleviate massive unemployment by employing single young men ages 18 to 25 and at the same time implementing a nationwide conservation program.

Within a few months there were over 1,300 CCC camps in the United States, with over 250,000 enrollees. The young men began the daunting tasks of reforestation, road and bridge construction, wildfire suppression, stream improvement, erosion control operations and a host of national and state park projects.

They would soon be known as “Roosevelt’s Tree Army” for their work to revitalize the nation’s forests.

Camp operations were directed by personnel from the Department of the Army and skilled civilian engineers and foresters served as foremen that oversaw most work projects away from camp.

The CCC boys each were paid $1 a day, with $25 of their monthly checks sent to their families back home. The income became an important source of money for families experiencing hard times, and it boosted local economies across the nation.

By the end of 1935, over 2,650 camps dotted the landscape of the United States that employed over 505,000 young men. On June 5, 1933, nearly 200 men of CCC Company 341 left training at Fort Meade, Md., arriving in Benton, Columbia County, where both men and supplies were loaded onto community trucks for the 10-mile drive to a remote swamp covered with boulders and weeds, and infested with biting insects.

The men cleared enough space to pitch their tents and hunkered down for the night.

A heavy-winded rainstorm ripped through the makeshift camp that evening. Eighteen men quit and went home the following day.

The forested area around CCC Camp S-104 was considered the last inaccessible tract of forested land in the state and it was managed by the Pennsylvania Game Commission as a wildlife refuge. Only crude logging trails spider-veined through the tangled slash.

The camp quickly took shape in the spring of 1933 along the West Branch of Fishing Creek, near the old lumber town of Emmons in Davidson Township, Sullivan County, about 2 miles north of Elk Grove. The officers’ quarters, camp headquarters, blacksmith shop, dining hall, and tool house were constructed in short order.

The Stars and Stripes snapped in the wind from a pole at the center of camp. A massive ornamental gateway arch of hewn birch logs was constructed in August 1933, and the camp was christened Camp Morton in honor of the Game Commission’s Chief of the Bureau of Refuges, James N. Morton.

It was one of 151 CCC camps that would spring up on the wild lands of Pennsylvania.

Libby enrolled in the CCC in April 1934 as a 17-year-old with a pencil-thin mustache, and bearing a striking resemblance to a young Errol Flynn. At the restaurant, a captivated audience admired an old photograph of Libby, which was displayed on a screen behind him as he recounted his fond memories of Camp Morton.

“I was first assigned to a dynamite crew that blew up stumps and large rocks to make way for road construction,” he said. “We used a star drill bit and an 8-pound sledge hammer to pound holes in the rock for the dynamite and then ran a long wire back to the detonator. When the foreman yelled, ‘Fire in the hole,’ you had better take cover. Then kaboom.”

Libby told of a road-construction crew hearing a strange crying noise coming from a hole beneath a large stump one early spring day.

The boys discovered two bawling little black bear cubs and soon learned that the sow likely was killed by a poacher. The young bears were taken to camp where they were fed and cared for. They grew rapidly. The cubs spent the next two years as honorary members of Camp Morton and were regular visitors to the chow hall at meal times.

Libby remembers the day that the local Game Protector came into camp after hearing of the bears, with the intent of relocating them to a remote location. Libby said that as a crowd gathered one of the boys yelled “You ain’t takin those bears.” A few tense moments ensued before the Game Protector persuaded the men to relent by explaining the move was in the best interest of the bears – and by tapping a few times on his sidearm holster.

There were three women to Libby’s left that listened with special interest as he recalled when a 16-year-old girl named Irene Seward from Benton was near death and in dire need of a blood transfusion. Libby had the rare blood type that the girl required and volunteered to be driven to the hospital in Bloomsburg.

“Back then blood was transferred directly from donor to patient, arm to arm,” he said.

Seward was able to hold onto life that day but became unconscious and in need of another transfusion a few days later.

Libby was summoned to the hospital once again.

“As my blood started flowing into her she instantly awoke and looked over at me with a smile,” Libby said, fighting back tears.

The young girl recovered fully from her illness.

Those three women consider Libby a hero. They are two of Seward’s daughters and one of her granddaughters.

The Civilian Conservation Corps program began to erode as the depression waned and employment opportunities improved, resulting in fewer enrollees. Camp Morton ceased operations in December 1937.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most federal programs were reorganized to support the war effort and Congress eventually ceased CCC funding.

The last camps in the United States closed by the spring of 1942.

But the legacy of those men who served endures.

From 1933 to 1942, the boys of Roosevelt’s Tree Army planted over three billion trees, sowing the seeds of environmental conservation into the soul of America.