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From: "Missouri Archaeology" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Conservation Corps alumni museum is closing in St. Louis
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:26:26 -0500
========================================================= Important Subscriber Information:Conservation Corps alumni museum is closing in St. LouisST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
LEMAY — A museum dedicated to the young laborers of a Depression-era, public works program will close its doors for good Thursday afternoon.
Soon, the National Association of Civilian Conservation Corps Alumni Headquarters and Museum will be just a memory — at least for those St. Louisans who knew it existed in the first place.
Attendance among the uninitiated, after all, was never particularly strong. During its 21 years in St. Louis, the museum seemed to focus less on bringing in the general public than providing a resource for CCC alumni who wanted to remember — and sometimes show to grandchildren — the labors of their youth.
"We had a lot of members at one time, but they've been dying or just getting too frail to come in," said Harry Dallas, 87, the last CCC alumnus to serve as a volunteer guide at the museum. "I'm one of young ones . … And there aren't many of us left."
Between 1933 and 1942, some 3.5 million men served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal jobs program started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The corps took unemployed, single men and put them to work planting trees, repairing the soil, fighting forest fires and building state and national parks. In the St. Louis area, Babler State Park in Wildwood and the lodge at Pere Marquette State Park near Grafton are testaments to what the CCC could do.
Dallas, who lives in Overland, said the corps alumni formed the national association in 1977 as part of an unsuccessful effort to revive the corps. In 1987, the headquarters moved from Falls Church, Va., to Jefferson Barracks, not far from the site of a long-gone CCC induction camp.
Soon, the museum's artifacts will be headed back to Virginia. Because of dwindling membership, the CCC alumni group that runs the museum merged with a historical society based near the site of the first CCC labor camp. That group has promised to maintain the museum's collection and preserve the CCC's memory.
Packing up what the museum believes will end up being about 150 cubic yards of old photos and discharge forms, antique hand tools, workers' uniforms and hundreds of other artifacts will be difficult work for Dallas. He's done it once before, when a representative from the Smithsonian Institution came by a couple of years ago and took with him most of the museum's vast archives.
"When that big old van left here for Washington, D.C., I was about to cry," Dallas said. "I have a feeling it's going to be worse this time."
The museum is open this week today through Thursday between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. It sits inside an old officers' quarters at 16 Hancock Avenue in Jefferson Barracks County Park.
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