Pepper Hill Fire of Nineteen Thirty-Eight

In the summer of nineteen thirty-eight, a crew of young men from the Civilian Conservation Corps was sent to fight a wildfire burning through the forests of Clinton County. Seven teenagers and a forestry foreman died here on Pepper Hill trying to put it out. The crew was exhausted from battling a previous fire and had not received adequate training for the conditions they faced.

The tragedy at Pepper Hill did not disappear into history. Decades later, the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center incorporated the events of that day into a training case study used to prepare firefighters across the country. The goal was to ensure that the mistakes made here would save lives elsewhere, and by many accounts that ongoing training has done exactly that. The young men who died on this hillside changed the way America trains those who fight fires.