The young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps who, in the depths of the Great Depression, carved Myakka River State Park out of raw wilderness by hand.
I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and this whole park — the road you're driving, the bridge you crossed, the weir where the gators lie, the boat basin at the lake — was built by hand, by a small army of hungry young men, in the hardest years this country ever knew. Let me tell you about them, because they deserve to be remembered.
The time is the nineteen-thirties, the depths of the Great Depression. A quarter of the country is out of work; families are hungry; young men in particular are drifting, jobless and hopeless. And the government starts a program to do two things at once: give those young men work and pay and three square meals a day — and put them to building up the nation's parks and forests. They called it the Civilian Conservation Corps, the C-C-C, and the boys who joined were mostly in their late teens and early twenties, sent off to live in camps and work with their hands.
And a company of them came here, to this wild, buggy, alligator-infested stretch of the Myakka, and they went to work building a park where there was nothing but wilderness. And understand — they didn't have the machines we'd use today. They did it with shovels and axes and mule teams and their own backs. They dug that boat basin at the lake by hand. They felled trees and hand-built the first bridge over the river. They laid the road, built the stone weir, dug the drainage, and raised five sturdy little cabins out of palm logs — cabins so well made that people still rent them and sleep in them today, ninety years on. Sweating through the Florida heat, swatting mosquitoes the size of sparrows, working alongside the gators and the snakes, those young men built this beautiful place.
It was one of Florida's very first state parks, and it opened to the public right around the start of the Second World War, and a lot of those same CCC boys shipped straight off to go fight it. Most of them never came back to see what they'd made. So as you drive this road and cross this river and look out over that lake, run your hand over the thought of them — broke, hungry, far from home, building something fine and lasting out of nothing, in the middle of a hard, dark time. This park is their monument. Roll on, and tip your hat to the boys of the C-C-C.
Photo: Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. 7/1/1905 · Public domain
