Work Progress Administration Employees Marking Boundary on a Midwestern Refuge

Three Works Progress Administration employees pause and pose in the bottomland of Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge as survey work and the placement of boundary markers continues along the 264-mile Federal refuge. The WPA was created to put destitute men and women back to work quickly, and was one of the New Deal’s most well-known economic measures designed to get people off of relief rolls. This photograph was taken in winter, circa 1939. Labor contributed by the WPA and its companion New Deal agency, the Civilian Conservation Corps, produced lasting change on America’s national wildlife refuges. By 1942, when the CCC fell victim to labor shortages necessitated by World War II, 53 national wildlife refuges had hosted CCC camps, where young men erected fire towers and telephone lines, stabilized stream banks, and planted millions of seedling trees. In 1939, Biological Survey CCC camps moved 4.1 million cubic yards of dirt for levees and jetties and estimated more than 460 million fish had been stocked in U.S. waters. Director Ira Gabrielson concluded about the CCC in 1943, “at first the event did not seem of great interest to wildlife conservationists, but it was another of those happenings which none considered epochal at the time but which later have brought about startling results.”