The CCC at Bastrop State Park

The forest the corps worked in is a botanical outlier: loblolly pines growing at the western edge of the species' range, in a belt some thirteen miles across. Domingo Teran de los Rios described it in 1691. Logging peaked around 1880, yet the forest held 36,400 hectares then and 34,400 in 1952. Genetic studies find the Lost Pines closely related to East Texas loblollies and not genetically poorer. Inside Bastrop and Buescher state parks, pine cover rose from 25.5 percent in 1949 to 37.2 percent in 1995.

What the plaque says

The CCC at Bastrop State Park President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U. S. Congress, as part of the New Deal efforts to offer unemployed workers jobs on public projects, created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in March 1933. Due to decades of lumbering activities, Bastrop County's "Lost Pines" forest was a prime candidate for the CCC's reforestation program and a logical site for the establishment of a park. Two hundred recruits of the CCC's Company #1805 arrived in Bastrop in November 1933. With the help of Austin architect Arthur Fehr and a group of "local experienced men" or L. E. M.s, the men worked to create a state recreational park in the forest. Built of native materials in the "NPS Rustic" style promoted by the National Park service, the park structures, particularly the central refectory, reflect the expert craftsmanship of the CCC. A second CCC company, #1811, arrived in November 1934 to assist with reforestation work and development of nearby Buescher State Park. Additional activities included making native wood furniture for this and other Texas state parks, and building roads, trails, bridges, and small lakes. CCC work at Bastrop ended with the park substantially complete in 1939. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 0.2 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 18 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 27 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 28 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• Felipe Enrique Neri Baron de Bastrop — steps away
• Lost Pines of Texas — 0.6 mi
• The Gotier Trace — 0.6 mi
• Early History of the City of Bastrop — 0.6 mi