CCC Camp Taylor Lake

I've visited the sites of several CCC camps "up north" in the general vicinity of our cabin.  They are always fascinating.  So when I heard about one that was said to be in such good condition that the baseball backstop was still intact I was quite optimistic.

In one sense this site, Camp Taylor Lake, was a disappointment.  But in examining the reasons why the CCC remains were so minimal I did, as a sort of historical consolation prize, come across another nice little story.  More of a tribute really.

The sense of something being not quite right began with that baseball backstop.

It is in way too good a state of preservation to be from the 1930s.  It still has chicken wire on it.  And there was a basketball back board in even better shape.  The things that looked "too new" were everywhere.

Even the floor surfaces I came across were well preserved.  Usually CCC camps were tossed together with whatever was on hand and by recruits who had at best a vague idea of how to build things.  Crumbling concrete and foundations made of round boulders are the norm.

To understand this let's just meander through the history of this camp.  As it indicates on the sign, this was a camp that was established early in the CCC era....and with operations continuing to 1942 it would have been one of the last ones to exist in Wisconsin.  It appears to have been a fairly major camp, one that was a sort of hub for others.

With the usual fragmentary histories available I have been able to puzzle out that it was established by a "junior" CCC Company.  A group made up of World War One veterans - note the V designation on the sign - arrived in 1936.  The work was of course appropriate to the area.  Forestry and fire fighting.  A picture of Company V1676:

You can't tell much about the camp from this.  Just that there was at least one whoppin' big barracks type building there.

With the onset of WWII the CCC was disbanded, most of the young and not so young men exchanging one uniform for another and joining the armed forces.

The camp on Taylor Lake was presumably vacant during the war years but in 1951 it was leased by Northwestern University who operated a surveying school there for the next five years.  The University of Wisconsin took it over at about that time and for the same purpose.  It was said that there were..."about 20 permanent metal buildings, many of which remain from the days when it was a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in the 1930's.  Previously the University of Wisconsin's Engineering department had run their surveying camp near Devil's Lake, but pesky tourists had become too much of a problem there.

The new camp on Taylor Lake was very much the project of one man.  He is remembered at the site:

On his passing one of his students, later a colleague penned a very nice memorial to Professor Eldon Wagner.  It mentions prominently his love of the Camp Taylor site, the quality of the engineering knowledge passed along there, and the role his wife Roselyn took in the practical running of the camp.  The softball field apparently was the site of annual student vs. faculty ball games.  I found some photos of the program and the site HERE.   

The engineering camp specialized in surveying technology and ran until 1972.  By that point the old CCC buildings must have been getting a bit run down and apparently everything was razed.

There's a lesson here for me.  Not all history of importance is a thousand or even a hundred years old.  I went to Taylor Lake just looking for another collection of picturesque CCC ruins, remnants of the Greatest Generation's younger days.  In that I was disappointed. Taylor Lake CCC camp was built to a higher initial level of quality and then well maintained.  But what I found instead was a neat little story.  Of Professor Eldon Wagner and his colleague and biographer Dr. Paul Wolf.  Here they are posing - I think - on the ball field, backstop behind them.  They are both gone now but I'm delighted to help keep a bit of their story alive.