Back to basics at French Creek Park

Preserving and returning the park to the look and feel of its 1930s origins is a passion of park staff.

There’s a name for the paint color of rustic cabins you find in 7,000 or so acres of French Creek State Park. It’s called CCC brown, as in Civilian Conservation Corps.

And it is still used today in French Creek State Park in Union Township, along with timber from its forest, milled at the Historic Johanna Sawmill nearby.

The colors and architecture were chosen to help people enjoy the natural environment around them.

“They did it because they wanted to match the forest,” Operations Manager James Wassell said.

Preserving and returning the park to the look and feel of its 1930s origins is never far from Wassell’s mind even as his small crew focuses on serving the thousands of visitors that fill the park.

“State parks are unique,” Wassell said. “This is a town of 5,000 with infrastructure such as water, sewer, power.”

Each year a few buildings are repainted by volunteers, even this year despite the coronavirus. The park has a strong relationship with Twin Valley High School and surrounding Scouting troops.

In 2012 a maintenance crew even rebuilt a cook’s cabin using old pictures as reference. And a dedicated volunteer continues to update signs using the wood routing technique of the CCC era.

As recently as this month, volunteers from French Creek Bible Conference helped stain group camp one mess hall.

“It is important that we preserve the CCC buildings we have in the park, this is one building that needed some extra attention,” the park said on its Facebook page.

On a recent tour, Wassell marveled that the CCC barracks (the camps were administered by the Army) were constructed to last maybe a decade and were still standing.

“It’s a testament to the skill they had in the 1930s,” he said.

Before it became a park, the French Creek area was home to two CCC camps in which young, unemployed, unmarried men

aged 18-25 worked following the Great Depression. They were young World War I veterans who came looking for work and skills.

Others were teens who would end up fighting in World War II, Wassell said.

The camps operated until the

early 1940s. The “CCC boys” built two dams, two group camps, several tent camping areas, beaches, roads and picnic areas and started the restoration process for the historic core of Hopewell Furnace.

French Creek became what was called a Recreational Demonstration Area — a spot to encourage outdoor recreation. Of the 31 RDAs built through CCC labor, five were in Pennsylvania.

In 1946, most of the property and recreation facilities were transferred to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, creating French Creek State Park.

The historic core of the furnace operations and some of the surrounding fields and woodlands were retained and are administered by the National Park Service as Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site.

Pennsylvania was key to the CCC. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was influenced to create the CCC after observing Gov. Gifford Pinchot’s (1923-27; 1931-35) work relief programs in Pennsylvania.

It had the second-highest number of camps. Laurel Hill State Park is the largest intact RDA in Pennsylvania. French Creek is second.

If you would like to volunteer at French Creek, contact the park office at 610- 582-9680.

BEN HASTY — READING EAGLE One of the cabins, named The Cook’s Cabin, in a group camping area. The original cabin burnt down, and this one was built based on photographs to match the original.

Park Operations Manager James Wassell stands in one of the shelters in a group camping area.

READING EAGLE Civilian Conservation Corps workers work on a road in the camp at French Creek State Park. Some of the structures there were built by the CCC, which operated in the 1930s and ’40s as part of the New Deal, as a response to the Great Depression.