Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Wind Cave

The men of Camp NP-1 worked underground as well as on top: inside Wind Cave they rebuilt the tour trails, set concrete steps and indirect lighting, and sank the 208-foot elevator shaft. The bronze also credits them with the park's pigtail bridge, but the National Register gives that spiral span as built about 1930 by the State Highway Department, four years before the camp opened. Of the camp's buildings, the park says one survives, the officers' quarters of 1934. At Jewel Cave the same men built a headquarters and trail.

What the plaque says

Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Camp NP-1 (DNP-1): located southeast of the cave entrance in Wind Cave Canyon. Companies: 2754--7/16/34-11/1/39 2757 detachment--4/18/40-8/1/40 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 Wind Cave was part of a national CCC program to improve the nation's park system. Supervised by the National Park Service, enrollees developed Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument. In Wind Cave CCs renovated tour trails and installed the 208 foot elevator shaft and building, concrete steps and indirect lighting. They constructed the Park water and sewer systems, parking area, stone guard rails, 18.6 miles of big game fence, the pigtail bridge and several smaller ones and several miles of road. CCs built ten buildings, helped WPA remodel five others and landscaped headquarters area and state highway. At Jewel Cave, they reno- vated the cave, disposed of old buildings and built a headquarters building, parking lot and an 800 foot trail. Erected in 1991 by CCC Alumni, the South Dakota State Historical Society, the South Dakota Department of Transportation and Wind Cave National Park

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wind Cave National Park — 2.4 mi
  A cave that breathes through a hole the size of a dinner plate, lined with nearly all the boxwork known on Earth, under a prairie restocked with bison shipped from New York.
• The Mammoth Site — 6.6 mi
  A housing lot in Hot Springs where a bulldozer turned up a tusk in 1974 and the developer gave up the subdivision for sixty-one mammoths.
• Needles Highway — 17 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 — 17 mi
  The lodge where Calvin Coolidge spent the summer of 1927, fishing for trout, dedicating Mount Rushmore, and deciding not to run again.

More markers nearby

• Battle Mountain — 5.6 mi
• The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, SD — 6.8 mi
• Hot Springs SD — 7.1 mi
• Jedediah Strong Smith's Route - 1823 — 7.5 mi