Historical Marker
The Civilian Conservation Corps at Palo Duro Canyon State Park
Randall County · Texas
Erected 2009
Nationally the Civilian Conservation Corps ran from 1933 to 1942 and put 2.5 million young men to work out of nearly 3,000 camps of about 200 men each, supervised by the Army. Enrollees, normally seventeen to twenty-five and from families on relief, earned thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which went straight home. Nearly 50,000 Texans enrolled. Of the fifty-six Texas state parks the CCC helped build, thirty-one still exist, Palo Duro Canyon among them. Most Texas camps worked on soil conservation; about twenty-five built parks.
What the plaque says
The Civilian Conservation Corps at Palo Duro Canyon State Park The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a New Deal program developed under the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide jobs to the unemployed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The program was initially designed to employ young men and later grew to include World War I veterans. The CCC was just what was needed to improve the 15,000 acres that had been recently acquired by the State of Texas for the establishment of Palo Duro Canyon State Park. The first three companies of CCC enrollees, made up of World War I veterans, arrived in Amarillo via train on July 11 and 12, 1933. After setting up their camp, the first task for the early workers was the construction of the road from the rim of the canyon to its floor. The fourth veterans company arrived in December of 1933. The early veterans groups at the canyon were initially integrated, but the African American troops were reassigned to Sweetwater, Texas in 1934. Two companies of segregated African American enrollees arrived from East Texas in August 1935. The final group of workers to labor in the canyon was comprised of youth members, and when the group left the park in December 1937, the project at Palo Duro Canyon was one of the few to include workers from each of the three special groups -- veterans, African Americans and juveniles. The projects completed by the CCC from 1933 until 1937 include public buildings (such as El Coronado Lodge) and cabins constructed of native sandstone, roads, bridges, culverts and hiking and bridle trails, many of which are still in use today. (2009)
Where it stands
34.97926, -101.69135 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Palo Duro Canyon State Park — steps awayThe upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
- TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 1.8 miA summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.
- Lighthouse Trail — 2.3 miThe park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.
- Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 13 miThe Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.