Vogel State Park: Depression-Era CCC in the Blue Ridge
Near Helen, Georgia
Vogel State Park, established in nineteen thirty-one near Blairsville, Georgia, is the second oldest state park in Georgia. It exists because the Vogel family donated land to the state in nineteen twenty-seven for conservation purposes. The park became one of the first projects of President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. Young men in CCC Company Four Thirty-One built the stone dam on Wolf Creek that impounded the roughly twenty-acre Lake Trahlyta, constructed cabins, picnic shelters, and campgrounds, and shaped the landscape visitors see today.
The park sits below Blood Mountain, the highest peak on the Georgia section of the Appalachian Trail, and it houses one of the few CCC museums in Georgia, where artifacts and photographs from those Depression-era work camps are preserved. Lake Trahlyta takes its name from a Cherokee legend about a princess who kept her youth by bathing in the local springs.
