Laurel Hill State Park, New Deal Legacy

Laurel Hill State Park in Somerset County is one of five Recreational Demonstration Areas that the National Park Service created across Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, as part of a nationwide effort to put struggling land to public use and put struggling people to work.

Between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen forty-one, crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration built the roads, cabins, picnic shelters, and facilities that still define the park today. The idea was to take marginal or exhausted farmland, restore it, and hand it over to communities as public recreation. Laurel Hill holds the largest collection of Civilian Conservation Corps architecture in Pennsylvania's state parks. The park is still welcoming visitors on the same trails and in the same shelters those Depression-era workers built almost ninety years ago.