Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Horse Creek

Four companies came and went at Camp F-2 in three years, from May 1933 to its closing in May 1936, the briefest run among the four CCC bronzes in this county. The work was ordinary Forest Service labor: thinning pine for posts and firewood, cutting firebreaks and trails, building roads. The bronze adds that the telephone line strung for fire control was used by local residents too, and it casts the odd verb renovated for trees that were cut and hauled out. The camp stood two miles west, up Horse Creek.

What the plaque says

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Camp F-2 (DF-2) Horse Creek: Located 2 miles W on Horse Creek Companies: 791--5/22/33-4/30/34 2752--7/30/34-10/21/35 2761--10/25/35-01/36 2748--01/36-5/25/36 The Civilian Conservation Corps was a federal relief program during 1933-1942 that gave jobless men work renovating abused lands. The Army built 48 200-man camps in South Dakota and provided food, clothing, medical care, pay and programs of education, recreation and religion for 23,709 enrollees (single men aged 17-25 who sent $25 of their $30 wage to their families) and war veterans. Camps and work projects were supervised by another 2834 men. The Office of Indian Affairs ran smaller units for 4554 American Indians. Camp F-2 was part of a national CCC program to renovate forests and build more recreation areas. Work projects, supervised by the USDA Forest Service, included tree thinning, pruning and planting, fire prevention and suppression; rodent, disease and insect control; grazing land improvement and recreation area development. Enrollees renovated dead, diseased, suppressed and excess trees (used for posts, poles and firewood) from hundreds of acres of pine leaving enough trees to produce good quality lumber. They removed flammable debris from forests and nearby areas and quelled forest fires. CCs built firetrails, firebreaks and roads. They constructed telephone lines to improve communications for fire control but they were also used by local residents. Erected in 1991 by CCC Alumni, the South Dakota State Historical Society and the South Dakota Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1880 Train — 6.1 mi
  A steam excursion on a mining branch line that hauled gear for Mount Rushmore, named for a decade it never ran in by a man who wanted steam to survive.
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 8.7 mi
  Four faces blasted out of a sacred mountain by 400 workers in fourteen years, with a Jefferson that had to be dynamited off and a hall of records never finished.
• Black Elk Peak — 9.5 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 — 13 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

• Sheridan 1875-1942 — 2.4 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Pactola — 4.7 mi
• Hill City — 6.3 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Mystic — 8.6 mi