Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Lightning Creek

The first men at Camp F-14 were veterans of the First World War from North Dakota and Iowa, Company 1783V, who arrived in October 1933 and spent most of their time building the camp and thinning timber. Company 791 came in April 1934 and stayed into the fall of 1941, through seven seasons. Its men ran side camps at Drew and Summit Peak ranger stations, Compton Spring, Billy Hay Pen and Freeland Wells, working range land as well as forest.

What the plaque says

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Camp F-14 Lightning Creek: located 0.7 mile NW on road 288 Companies: 1783V--10/17/33-Spring 34 791--4/30/34-Fall 41 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-14 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. Veterans from North Dakota and Iowa in Company 1783V devoted most of their time to camp improvement and tree thinning. Enrollees in Company 791 operated sidecamps at Drew and Summit Peak ranger stations, Compton Spring, Billy Hay Pen and Freeland Wells. They built a ranger station, garage, roads, several bridges, telephone lines and firetrails and quelled fires. CCs dug wells, built cattle guards and drift fences and developed springs on grazing land, erected erosion control dams and spread grasshopper bait on thousands of acres. Erected in 1991 by CCC Alumni, the South Dakota State Historical Society, the South Dakota Department of Transportation and Black Hills National Forest

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jewel Cave National Monument — 4.3 mi
  A cave the prospectors who found it sold to the government for $750, thought to be two miles long until a climbing couple began to walk it in 1959.
• Crazy Horse Memorial — 8.9 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.
• Black Elk Peak — 14 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.
• Needles Highway — 14 mi
  Fourteen miles that Governor Peter Norbeck laid out on foot and horseback through the granite spires, threading a tunnel eight feet wide.

More markers nearby

• Memorial to Horace N. Ross — 7.3 mi
• The Hearst Highway — 7.5 mi
• Campsite of General Custer's Expedition — 10 mi
• In Memory of Anna Donna Tallent — 11 mi