New Deal Days
The CCC at Mesa Verde
Ronald C. Brown
&
Duane A. Smith
They fought fires, built roads, constructed dioramas, and put Dolores’s jail in the river. They were Mesa Verde’s CCC Boys. In 1932 at least one out of every four workers in the United States was jobless, perhaps as many as one-third. Slashed paychecks and shortened hours confronted many of the rest. One of the major problems proved hard to solve: So many of those out of work were young men, with few prospects and limited skills.
In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal. He would tinker, change, and experiment to save American capitalism and democracy. One of his most successful experiments was the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, aimed at those desperate young men at home and wandering about the country.
Ronald C. Brown
Mr. Brown was raised in Milford, Indiana, and graduated from Wabash College and the University of Illinois at Urbana. He is a Professor of history and Dean of University College at Texas State University - San Marcos. He became interested in the CCC while an undergraduate in the 1960s, and credits his friends Duane and Gay Smith with kindling his infatuation with Mesa Verde. He, wife Judy and son Brian spent two memorable summers working on CCC research at the MVNP Research Center and Library in the early 1990s.
Duane A. Smith
Duane Smith received
his academic degrees from the University of Colorado and completed
his Ph.D. in 1964.
That year he began to teach at Fort Lewis College where he is a Professor
of Southwest Studies.
His areas of research and writing include Colorado history, Civil
War history, mining history, urban history and baseball history.
He is an extremely popular professor at Fort Lewis, and he is the
author of over thirty books on a variety of subjects including Rocky
Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier; A Colorado History; Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend; Silver Saga: The
Story of Caribou Colorado; Colorado Mining: A Photographic
History; Fortunes Are for the Few: Letters of a Forty-niner; Rocky Mountain Boom Town: A History of Durango; A Land Alone:
Colorado’s Western Slope; Song of the Hammer and Drill: The
Colorado San Juans, 1860-1914; Mining America: The Industry
and the Environment, 1800-1980; Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows
of the Centuries; The Birth of Colorado: A Civil War Perspective;
and Sacred Trust: The Birth and Development of Fort Lewis College.
