Depression-era Workers on National Wildlife Refuge

Much of the credit for the development of the National Wildlife Refuge System belongs to the workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, which spent most of the 1930’s creating and revitalizing the Nation’s parks, forests, hatcheries, and wildlife refuges. The Bureau of Biological Survey in the Agriculture Department (and its successor agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Interior Department) were prime beneficiaries of this Depression-era labor, and many of the National Wildlife Refuge System’s roads and culverts; check dams and water systems; reforested lands; and offices, staff housing, and public buildings were constructed by these two agencies. The CCC’s principal focus was training and providing valuable life skills to the young men of America, while the WPA was a massive public works program designed to put unemployed men and women of any age back to work and to reduce relief rolls. Their handiwork is largely still apparent in the Nation’s refuges and parks; as the Salt Lake Tribune concluded in 1942 when the CCC was disbanded at the onset of the Second World War, “More than all else it aided youth to get a new grip on destiny and obtain a saner outlook on the needs of the nation ... The CCC may be dead but the whole country is covered with lasting monuments to its timely service.” In the snowy winter of 1939, these WPA workers established boundary lines in the Black River bottoms section of the new Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, which as a 264-mile Federal refuge along the river fronts of four states was struggling to delineate its property lines.