Cabin camps built by the CCC, documented by students at Prince William Forest Park

More than 2,000 young men in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) companies spent seven years building what is now Prince William Forest Park, in Virginia. Starting in the summer of 2018, the National Park Service (NPS) and the University of Mary Washington (UMW) ran a field school there to document two of their five cabin camps, Cabin Camp 4 and Cabin Camp 2, as cultural landscapes. The park is about 35 miles south of Washington, DC.

The roads to the cabin camps are part of the historic design of the landscapes. NPS / National Capital Region.

The camps

The cabin camps were built as part of the Recreational Demonstration Area (RDA) program, begun in 1933 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to find land near cities whose resources had been depleted and to restore it. The park then went by the name Chopawamsic RDA. The CCC crews built the five cabin camps, swimming and recreation lakes, and many of the roads, trails and bridges still in use, using wood and stone found or made in the park, a portable sawmill and an on-site blacksmith shop.

The labor came from the CCC, but the designs were attributed to Works Progress Administration architects and engineers. The Rustic style of the buildings is typical of the period from 1933 to 1942, with attention to native materials and a hand-crafted look that sets the buildings in harmony with the landscape. Chopawamsic RDA opened in 1936 as a summer camp for children from Washington, DC. It was the fourth largest of the 46 RDAs created across the country. Organizations in the capital worked with the NPS to sponsor camps for children and families of different backgrounds, and each camp took on a character from its users. The use also shows how segregation shaped the park: two of the five camps, including Cabin Camp 4, were run for African American children and families.

Unit D Bath House in Cabin Camp 4. NPS / National Capital Region.

A typical four-person sleeping cabin in Cabin Camp 2. NPS.

The field school

Four students took part: two juniors, a senior and a graduate student, at different stages of historic preservation and GIS programs. The school was coordinated by Michael Spencer, associate professor and director of UMW's Center for Historic Preservation, with the cultural landscapes staff of the NPS National Capital Region and park staff. Over several weeks the students recorded the existing condition of landscape features with photographs, data-collection forms and GPS equipment. Their work is baseline documentation for Cultural Landscape Inventory (CLI) reports, which identify, document and evaluate a park's historically significant landscapes, and for meeting the Park Service's Section 110 documentation requirement.

NPS cultural landscape specialists Daniel Weldon and Maureen Joseph trained them in field documentation, using one camp as a model for learning to identify features and read the patterns and organization of natural and built systems. Reviewing their notes and photographs from one camp as they documented the other helped them compare the two and think about the reasons for their similarities and differences. In a later session they used GPS to make a geo-referenced map of Cabin Camp 2.

The partnership was set up through a Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU) agreement. CESUs provide research, technical assistance and education to federal land and environmental agencies and their partners. This was the pilot of its kind for the National Capital Region's Cultural Landscapes Program, modeled on the Acadia Field School run by the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation and adapted to local needs. The partners changed their processes as they learned what worked and what did not, and those lessons shaped the 2019 field school and will guide later ones.

Dining Hall at Cabin Camp 4, photographed in November 2016 during the overview survey of the landscape. NPS / National Capital Region.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Field School at Prince William Forest Park: Documenting Cabin Camps" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/prwi-field-school-partnership.htm); rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photos of the students at work are left out.