Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Tigerville

This bronze makes a technical claim the county's other CCC bronzes do not. The men of Camp F-15, it says, began the Sheridan dam and developed there the practice of injecting bentonite, a clay that swells when wet, into the rock beneath to keep earthen dams from leaking. They also built the Mayo and Mitchell dams, thinned up to 400 acres of pine a month and laid twenty miles of road in a single year. The bronze has Company 793, the last of four, leaving in June 1939. The camp stood a quarter mile south.

What the plaque says

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Camp F-15 Tigerville: Located 1/4 mile S of here. Companies: 765--10/26/33-Spring 1934 757--4/21/34-10/20/34 2748--10/21/34-1/36 793--5/25/36-6/13/39 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-15 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 thinned and pruned thousands of acres (up to 400 a month) of pines, removed brush, built fire trails and fire breaks and planted trees. They built and stocked small dams; erected telephone and power lines and built roads (20 miles in one year). CCs erected Mayo and Mitchell dams and started Sheridan dam where they developed the practice of injecting bentonite into rock substrata to prevent leakage of earthen dams. Erected in 1991 by CCC Alumni, the South Dakota State Historical Society, and Black Hills National Forest

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1880 Train — 7.5 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.
• Crazy Horse Memorial — 12 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 — 12 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.
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 14 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.

More markers nearby

• Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Mystic — 3.1 mi
• Hill City — 7.5 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Horse Creek — 9.8 mi
• Sheridan 1875-1942 — 11 mi