Chewacla: Built by the CCC in Depression-Era Alabama

In September nineteen thirty-five, Civilian Conservation Corps Company Four Thousand Four Hundred Forty-Eight arrived in Lee County and went to work. Over the next six years the young men of the Corps quarried local stone, built an arched masonry bridge, poured a concrete dam across Chewacla Creek, and constructed six stone cottages with fireplaces that still stand today. They impounded what is now Chewacla Lake, covering twenty-six acres.

The State of Alabama took control of the completed site in nineteen thirty-nine and opened it as Chewacla State Park. The name Chewacla itself is of Native American origin, reflecting the long Indigenous presence in this corner of east Alabama. The park sits just outside Auburn, and generations of university students have hiked its trails without realizing the stone and mortar around them was shaped by Depression-era hands more than eighty years ago.