Robert Black Civilian Conservation Corps collection

Robert Black was a volunteer historian for the National Park Service assigned to the Chiricahua National Monument. During his time there he began to research NM-2-A one of the many camps in Arizona where young people served in President’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “tree army” better known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Robert Black accumulated a considerable number of interviews and photographs of former CCC enrollees with the intention of one day publishing a commemorative booklet of the NM-2-A.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. It was a Depression Era program designed to provide jobs and relief for unemployed youth and their families. The majority of jobs were unskilled manual labor for the purpose of developing the natural resources in rural areas of the United States and its territories. From 1933-1942 there were 52,905 enrollees working in Arizona CCC camps. They built 5,783 miles of forest roads, constructed 3,559 miles of telephone lines and developed numerous recreational sites still used by Arizonan’s today. The program ceased to exist in 1942 when the United States Congress eliminated its funding.