Transcript
CCC boys reforested thousands of acres of state and federal lands in West Virginia, planting seedlings on land stripped of trees by logging or fire.
Dave Caplinger: If I could quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, he referred to forests as the plantations of God. And God did create the forests and plant them, but the Civilian Conservation Corps cultivated them and made them usable and welcoming to the public.
Delmer Snyder: They’d be a whole bunch of us, we had trays that had trees in. And we’d plant them things by the thousands. Not hundreds, thousands. We planted them all over this country. And you’d stand right there, you’d put that tree right down in the ground, you’d take both feet and push down on it, and you’d pull up the tree. You pulled it up right between your feet. Of course you get it closer than that, so you’ll break it. And you pull the tree up and push down at the same time, and you’d solid that thing. It wouldn’t fall over at all. That’s what they called it, tightening up, you go to do that.
Narrator: Between 1934 and 1939, CCC crews were responsible for planting more than three million seedlings across the Monongahela National Forest. The US Forest Service nursery at Parsons and the state nursery provided a wide variety of seedlings to CCC planting crews.
