Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - French Creek

One company held Camp SP-3 for seven years, from July 1934 to October 1941, and this bronze reads like its ledger. The men built the stone lookout and ranger's quarters on Mount Coolidge and the fourteen-room Blue Bell lodge with a dozen cabins, ran seventy miles of telephone line, and piped five springs into tanks for the park's bison. They sawed their own lumber and crushed their own rock, and cleared bark beetles from the southern half of the park. The camp stood two miles northeast, on French Creek.

What the plaque says

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Camp SP-3 (DSP-1 in 1934): NE 2 miles, end of CSP road on French Creek. Company: 2757--7/28/34-10/1/41. 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 1,700 veterans, 4,554 American Indians and 2,834 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. Work, supervised by Custer State Park and the National Park Service, included quelling forest fires, building a stone lookout and ranger's quarters on Mt. Coolidge, 25 miles of minor roads, 70 miles of telephone line, 11 miles of boundary fence, 20 bridges and a park custodian's log house and barn. The CCC constructed the 14-room Blue Bell lodge and a dozen cabins, developed 5 springs with water tanks for bison, developed Canyon Lake Park and fish hatchery in Rapid City, converted Galena log community building into a park office, and eliminated bark beetles from the southern half of the Park. They sawed the lumber, planed the logs, washed the sand and crushed the rock used on many building projects, and removed debris from 50 miles of park roadsides. Erected in 1990 by CCC Alumni, the South Dakota State Historical Society, the State Department of Transportation and Custer State Park.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Needles Highway — 3.3 mi
  Fourteen miles that Governor Peter Norbeck laid out on foot and horseback through the granite spires, threading a tunnel eight feet wide.
• State Game Lodge — 6.3 mi
  The lodge where Calvin Coolidge spent the summer of 1927, fishing for trout, dedicating Mount Rushmore, and deciding not to run again.
• Black Elk Peak — 10 mi
  The highest summit in the Black Hills, renamed in 2016 for an Oglala holy man after carrying, for 150 years, the name of the general who attacked a Sicangu camp in 1855.
• Crazy Horse Memorial — 11 mi
  A Lakota elder's answer to Mount Rushmore, carved for more than seventy years by one family with private money, and still argued over by Crazy Horse's own relatives.

More markers nearby

• The Badger Hole — 3.1 mi
• In Memory of Anna Donna Tallent — 4.0 mi
• Campsite of General Custer's Expedition — 4.4 mi
• Memorial to Horace N. Ross — 6.5 mi