Honeyman State Park: Built by the CCC

Three miles south of Florence, Jessie M. Honeyman Memorial State Park sits where the coastal forest meets the Oregon Dunes. Almost everything you see here, the stone bathhouse at Cleawox Lake, the rustic picnic shelters, the caretaker's house, was built between nineteen thirty-six and nineteen forty-one by the Civilian Conservation Corps under National Park Service direction.

The park was named for Jessie M. Honeyman of Portland, who lived from eighteen fifty-two to nineteen forty-eight and spent decades lobbying to protect Oregon's coastal scenery. As president of the Oregon Roadside Council she worked alongside the state's first parks superintendent to preserve the land. The CCC structures are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district. Two miles of sand dunes separate the park from the Pacific, and the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, more than thirty-one thousand acres of it, begins just beyond the western edge.