Allegany State Park: New York's Largest State Park

The forest stretching across the hills around you is Allegany State Park, the largest state park in New York, and one of those rare places where the land itself tells the story of the Great Depression.

The park was born in nineteen twenty-one, when a group of western New York civic leaders, including petroleum executive Addison Proctor Fancher and future state attorney general Hamilton Ward, persuaded the legislature to purchase about seven thousand acres in the Quaker Run Valley. The price was thirty-five thousand eight hundred dollars. The park was formally dedicated on July thirtieth of that year.

For its first decade, Allegany grew slowly. Then the Depression arrived, and with it the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-two, the CCC established seven separate camp locations within the park's boundaries and put hundreds of young men to work. They built the roads that still carry visitors today. They constructed stone bridges, campground pavilions, and picnic shelters. They dug the foundations for hundreds of rental cabins. They built a downhill ski area and two ski jumps. They erected a stone tower at two thousand two hundred fifty feet that still overlooks the city of Salamanca to the north. And they built the Outdoor Museum and Zoo from locally quarried sandstone.

The labor was disciplined and meticulous. CCC enrollees earned thirty dollars a month, of which twenty-five was sent home to their families. Many arrived malnourished and left healthy and skilled. The infrastructure they created in Allegany alone would have cost many times the wages paid.

By the time the CCC program ended in nineteen forty-two, Allegany had grown to encompass tens of thousands of acres and was one of the most developed public recreation areas in the eastern United States. Today the park covers more than sixty-four thousand acres, stretching along the Pennsylvania border, and the cabins, trails, and stone structures built by those Depression-era workers remain in use by millions of visitors each year.