The Civilian Conservation Corps at Pokagon

This marker remembers Company Five Fifty-Six of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the young men who built much of what you see around Pokagon State Park.

The Corps was Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era program that put unemployed single men to work on public lands. From nineteen thirty-four to nineteen forty-two, Company Five Fifty-Six lived here in a camp that included barracks, a mess hall, a recreation hall, and bath house.

With hand tools and sweat they raised a county road bridge, a beach and bath house, a saddle barn, a park office, campgrounds, and the famous toboggan run. They planted countless trees. Today Pokagon still holds many of these rustic Corps structures, stone and timber work that has outlasted the men who built it by nearly a century.