Historical Marker
Camp Packard - Company 1446
Castor Plunge, Rapides County · Louisiana
The corps arrived in a forest that was new and a landscape that was spent. Kisatchie National Forest was established on June 10, 1930, after about thirty years of unsupervised logging had left clear-cut ground, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the Stuart Seed Orchard in the 1930s to replant it. Other work was practical in odd ways: Stuart Lake exists because the orchard needed watering before modern irrigation, and Gum Springs still shows CCC design and construction. A marker at the Wild Azalea trailhead now recalls one of the camps.
Where it stands
31.21612, -92.61312 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Valentine Lake Recreation Area — 4.4 miA 46-acre Kisatchie National Forest lake dug by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s, with a campground and the head of the Wild Azalea Trail.
- Kent Plantation House — 9.9 miRapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
- Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 12 miThe restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
- Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 12 miThe Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.