CCC Company 850

Enrollees were paid $30 a month and wore khaki with black ties in camp, with blue fatigues for fieldwork. Two later recalled coming down from Blue Ridge for "three squares", clothes and a bunk. The canteen hosted planned leisure, and the infirmary ran quarantines for spotted fever and a meningitis scare. Commandant W. H. Coyle of Rowlett served from 1935 to 1937. When the camp closed in early 1941, the remaining 144 men went to Carlsbad, New Mexico. Historic Mesquite says the terracing they built is still visible near the high school.

What the plaque says

CCC Company 850 During the Great Depression, Hicks Jobson set aside eight acres of his farm to allow the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal work relief programs, to establish a local camp. Located 1/4 mile east of Mesquite, Company 850 welcomed 250 enrollees in June 1935. The site included 24 barracks, a mess hall, health facility, bath house and recreation hall. Under Project SCS-36-T, the men worked on soil conservation and engaged more than 300 farmers in Dallas and surrounding counties on over 40,000 acres until 1941. Work included terracing, fencing, check dams and levees along the east fork of the Trinity River. The camp land was later donated to Mesquite ISD. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 9.8 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 10 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 11 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 12 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Mesquite — 0.4 mi
• City Lake Park — 0.4 mi
• City of Mesquite — 0.5 mi
• Sam Bass Train Robbery — 0.5 mi