Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Farm Island

The bronze's first line holds the camp's least-told company. Before Company 796 of North Dakotans arrived on October 23, 1933, a company of Black enrollees worked here from June 27, its number unknown to the 1989 bronze and absent from the South Dakota CCC Museum's camp list, which opens Farm Island with the North Dakotans. Company 2756 then held the camp until September 1937. Between them the companies built the causeway onto the island and the dike that formed Hipple Lake, and raised the Lewis and Clark monument.

What the plaque says

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Camp S-207 (SE-207 in 1933): 1/4 mile W and 2 miles S on Farm Island Companies: Number unknown -- (Blacks) 06/27/33 - 10/22/33; 796 -- (North Dakotans) 10/23/33 - 11/01/34; 2756 -- 10/20/34 - 09/30/37. The Civilian Conservation Corps was a federal work-relief program during the Great Depression. From 1933 to 1942, the CCC provided work for 31,097 jobless men in South Dakota -- about 22,000 enrollees (single men aged 17-25), about 1700 veterans, 4554 American Indians, and 2834 supervisors. The U. S. Army provided 200-man camps, food, clothing, medical care, and pay, and educational, recreational, and religious programs. The Office of Indian Affairs provided similar services for units on Indian reservations. At this camp, the State Division of Forestry supervised the men who completed the Arikara dam northeast of Pierre and developed a park on Farm Island. Enrollees constructed the causeway across the river channel at the head of the island and the dike at the foot, forming Hipple Lake, and built wing dikes to reduce shoreline erosion. In addition, CCC crews backsloped a mile of lake shore; built seven miles of road; erected the Boy Scout cabin, Izaak Walton cabin, and Lewis and Clark monument; developed picnic areas, a trap and skeet range, and three holes for golf; and operated a 70-acre tree nursery. Erected in 1989 by CCC Alumni, the South Dakota State Historical Society and the State Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• South Dakota State Capitol — 3.8 mi
  A copper-domed capitol built to end three elections' worth of fighting over where the capital belonged, beside a lake fed by an artesian well with a gas flame burning in it.
• Verendrye Monument — 5.4 mi
  The hilltop above Fort Pierre where three children found a lead plate in 1913 that two French brothers had buried in 1743 to claim the West for their king.
• Oahe Dam — 9.4 mi
  One of the largest rolled-earth dams in the world, dedicated by President Kennedy in 1962, holding back a reservoir that reaches more than 230 miles to Bismarck.

More markers nearby

• Old Fort Sully — steps away
• Site of Old Fort Sully — 0.2 mi
• Ancient Indian Fortress — 3.2 mi
• Coe Crawford, 6th Governor of South Dakota — 3.5 mi