Civilian Conservation Corps Camps - Wall

Badlands National Monument was proclaimed in January 1939, and Company 2754 arrived that November to build its first works. Its biggest job was water. The men dug a sump and pump house on the White River, five miles of ditch and a reservoir at Cedar Pass, and when the drive from their camp near Sage Creek ran forty miles each way, a second camp opened near Cedar Pass in October 1941. It closed in March 1942, as the war ended the corps.

What the plaque says

Civilian Conservation Corps Camps Camps NP-2: 8 miles S of Wall on SD 240, 13 miles W (1 mile W of Sage Creek); and NP-3: 3/4 mile S of Cedar Pass Visitor Center. Company: 2754 (NP-2)--11/1/39-10/24/41; (NP-3)--10/24/41-3/25/42. 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 projects, supervised by the National Park Service, were in the 243,302-acre Badlands National Monument. Enrollees constructed a 20,000-gallon sump and pump house on the White River, 5 miles of ditch 6 to 12 feet deep, a reservoir 9 feet deep and 50 feet in diameter at Cedar Pass, and the connecting 4- and 6-inch pipes. They built the checking station at Pinnacles and the custodian's residence at Cedar Pass, graveled Sage Creek road, back-sloped roadsides and surveyed proposed development sites. Camp NP-3 was established to eliminate traveling 40 miles each way from Camp NP-2 to build the water system. Erected in 1990 by CCC Alumni, the South Dakota State Historical Society, the State Department of Transportation and Badlands National Park.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Minuteman Missile National Historic Site — 4.7 mi
  A launch control center and a silo saved from demolition, the last intact pieces of 150 nuclear missiles that waited under the wheat along I-90 for twenty-eight years.
• Badlands National Park — 5.7 mi
  The Badlands Wall from the Loop Road, a fossil lab with paleontologists working behind glass, and ferrets brought back from the edge of extinction.
• Wall Drug — 20 mi
  A Depression-era drugstore on the edge of the Badlands that survived by painting free ice water on signs along the highway, and never stopped.