Once or twice a year some old gentleman will

Once or twice a year some old gentleman will drive into Country Manor’s parking lot, find one of the proprietors and ask politely to walk around the grounds behind the shop. He may study the landscape up near the highway, search the creek bed for an old wooden dam, look for traces of old cement foundations in the field.

These men are searching for remains of Civilian Conservation Corps Camp #27, a camp of mostly Virginia men who lived there for several years during the depression and went out each day to improve the fire trails, do landscaping and clearing around the park, cut out the hiking trails and generally "built" those parts of the park where nature needed to be subdued or altered.

The camp at Beech Spring was one of SO CCC camps in Virginia. More than three quarters of the corpsmen were Virginians: it made sense that some of the corpsmen would be from urban areas where similiar "make work" programs were inundated. Twelve of the camps were for black Virginians.

The old gentlemen who visit the grounds around the Rappahannock gift shop near the entrance to the park are visiting a site where they weathered-along with one hundred or so others like them some of the tightest years they would ever know. For the most part, they were single men, whose efforts to find work outside their parents' small farms were unsuccessful. Families at home were depending on them and the government made sure that the corpsmen’s weekly trips into Luray or Stanley didn't deprive the folks back home of a share of the public works money. •Jimmy Swindler, as well as Fields Benton, who was at the camp for a while, said that of the $20 they received each month, $25 were sent back home. The typical term of service was six months. Swindler remembers that no-one could leave before that time unless he had proof of employment.