One of the other major CCC camps in Pend Oreille County was
Camp F-103. This camp was not the
typical junior enrollee camp with young men age seventeen to twenty-three. Instead, this was a Veterans’ Camp, with men
that had served in the Spanish-American War and World War I. The first group of sixty-seven men were transfers
from Company 1924 at Priest River, sent at first to Tacoma Creek. Camp F-103 was located south of the Usk
School, or what is now the Usk Community Hall.
Today this encompasses the land that Pend Oreille Valley Railroad (POVA)
has their buildings, as well as the McGill and Nelson properties. The officers’ quarters were located opposite
the main camp, overlooking the Pend Oreille River. Directly south of the camp was a cleared
tract of land for recreational purposes, with a nine-hole golf course, a
baseball diamond, and tennis and handball courts. The camp would have eight bunkhouses (20 x 80
feet each) with each having a bathroom and lavatory facilities, and a laundry
room. The camp’s kitchen would be 40 x
50 feet with all of the modern amenities found in a commercial kitchen of that
era. The kitchen would be adjacent to
the dining room (20 x 120 feet). Camp
F-103 would have an administrative building, a supply building, an oil
building, a recreation hall, a school room, a fully equipped infirmary, a
machine shop, and a sixteen-car garage.
Because the camp was to be occupied year-round, all of the buildings
were built for that purpose.
 |
| Location of Camp F-103 in Usk |
The 260 men that served in Company 2936-V at Camp F-103 Usk
undertook a variety of jobs, just like the junior enrollees at the other camps
in the region. The primary occupation of
Company 2936-V was fighting fires, fire suppression, smoke chasing, guarding
lookouts, and patrolling for fires. As a
result, the company had a 200-man fire-fighting unit that handled that part of
their work. There would be two spike
camps sent out of Camp F-103: one near Penrith (a forty-man unit), “an area
which has been repeatedly the scene of fire outbreaks the past two years,”[1]
and another forty-man unit in the vicinity of Box Canyon. These spike camps would do a great deal of
roadwork, including improving the road to the Calispell Mountain summit with
drainage culverts. In fact, between 1935
and 1941 Camp F-103 would construct twenty-three miles of fire trail and forest
protection roads. The veteran enrollees
at Camp F-103 would construct almost four miles of telephone lines, maintain 99
miles of horse and forest trails, build fire halls at Colville, Chewelah,
Valley, Deer Park, Newport, Usk, and Ione, and build six lookout towers and
guard cabins. Because this was a
permanent camp from the start, some of the work projects were designed to be
for the winter months. One such project
was the construction of a road on the east side of Davis Lake (State Route
211), with a great deal of the rock blasting to be done in the winter. There were “thousands of tons of rock blasted
into Davis Lake with places “where there were 100 foot cliffs to drill and
blast.”[2]
By 1941, Camp F-103 was still occupied and doing Civilian
Conservation Corps-type work while the other CCC camps in Pend Oreille and
Bonner Counties were being closed. By
February 1943 the camp and its lease (which had to be renewed) would be turned
over to the War Department. In 1944 the
camp would be occupied again by German and Italian “detainees” from the Four
Corners Camp (F-164) near the Falls Ranger Station in the Kaniksu National
Forest. These German and Italian
“detainees” or prisoners of war would continue the work that the CCC enrollees
had done in the 1930s. They would
especially concern themselves with blister rust control and fire-fighting, but
they did also maintain the trails and roads that were constructed by the CCC
enrollees.
Today you will only find remnants of the ECW/CCC camps here
in the Pacific Northwest. Most of these
camps were torn down with their buildings taken over or removed by the Forest
Service or the War Department once the CCC disbanded in 1941. The oil house from Camp F-1 Sullivan Lake is
currently on display at the Pend Oreille County Historical Society complex, the
Tacoma Creek camp is now part of the U.S. Air Force Survival School, and Camp
F-103 at Usk is now Part of the Pend Oreille Valley Railroad complex with a few
scattered homes around it.
 |
| Current View of Camp F-103 (POVA's Yard) |
 |
| Another Current View of Camp F-103, Taken From Black Road |
No comments:
Post a Comment