The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona's Rim Country

Part of the massive relief effort of Roosevelt's New Deal, the ccc was created in 1933 to give young men an opportunity to work and make money to help families devastated by the Great Depression, and to participate in forest and conservation projects across the country. In Arizona, thousands of young men, many of them from the industrial Northeast, served in the state's ccc forest camps. Arizona's Mogollon Rim is a spectacular expanse of cliffs that slices through half the state, stretching from Sedona eastward to New Mexico. Along with the White Mountains, it includes the largest contiguous forest of ponderosa pine in America. Remote and little-visited in the 1930s, the Rim Country offered copious outlets for the ccc men's energies: building roads, public campsites, hiking trails, fire lookout towers, and administration buildings; fighting fires; controlling erosion; eliminating vermin; and restoring damaged soils.