Umstead State Park: Farmland, the New Deal, and Raleigh's Green Lung

The forest surrounding you here on US Seventy was not always a forest. A century ago it was exhausted farmland, cotton fields that men had plowed down to red clay trying to coax one more crop out of soil that had nothing left to give.

In nineteen thirty-four, as the Depression ground through its worst years, state and federal agencies purchased about five thousand acres of this submarginal farmland wedged between the growing cities of Raleigh and Durham. The land had been cleared and farmed until it was nearly worthless, and the plan was to put it back. The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived to do the work, young men from across the country, many of them unemployed and hungry, who spent several years dismantling the old farmsteads, planting trees, building trails, and constructing four camps along Crabtree Creek. The park opened as a National Park Service recreation demonstration area in nineteen thirty-seven.

The CCC and Works Progress Administration built the stone shelters, bridges, and camp structures that still stand today, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The forest grew back around them. Over the following decades, what had been broken ground healed into a mature piedmont woodland, oak, hickory, pine, and sourwood, threaded by more than thirty miles of hiking, biking, and bridle trails.

North Carolina Governor William B. Umstead, who championed conservation during his brief term in office before his death in nineteen fifty-four, gave the park its name. Today the park sits practically inside the city limits of both Raleigh and Durham, a five thousand-acre sanctuary that was built by the hands of men who needed work, on land that needed rest, and given to a region that would come to badly need green space.

The old field furrows are long gone. The trees are tall now.