Camp Lunden: The CCC in the North Woods

In June of nineteen thirty-three, two hundred young men arrived near Hunt Creek in northern Michigan. They were members of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Franklin Roosevelt's answer to the Depression's mass unemployment. The men were unmarried, able-bodied, and between seventeen and twenty-three years old.

They soon relocated to a permanent site they named Camp Lunden, after a local landmark. For nearly a decade they planted trees, built trails, constructed bridges, and improved the Hunt Creek Fisheries Station. By nineteen thirty-six the camp had grown to forty buildings.

The CCC enrolled nearly three million men nationally between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-two, transforming cutover and eroded lands across the country. In Michigan alone, CCC crews planted more than four hundred million trees. The forests you see around you bear their work.