Jessieville Civilian Conservation Corps Camp

During the Great Depression, young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps camped right here in the Ouachita National Forest. A company of young men from Missouri arrived at Jessieville in the mid nineteen thirties. Their work was the unglamorous backbone of the forest.

They built a stone powder magazine to store the explosives used blasting rock for roads and bridges across the Ouachita. Other crews here raised a fieldstone dam that still holds back a modest swimming hole, plus picnic shelters and the headquarters buildings of the Jessieville ranger district. The company eventually moved on, but their handiwork outlasted them.

A short trail, a stone wall, and that little creek mark the spot today, an interpretive site along Scenic Highway Seven where Roosevelt's tree army left its quiet signature on the Arkansas woods.