DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my take on what the official marker has to say about the Ratcliff CCC Camp, out in Houston County. Now, before there was a national forest, before there was a lake, before there were three million trees standing in neat rows across this land — there was a sawmill. J.H.
Ratcliff's sawmill, to be precise, humming away out here in the 1880s, with a whole village grown up around it. Timber country. Big, dense, old-growth timber country.
And that's the thing about virgin forest — once you start cutting, you don't stop until there's nothing left to cut. By the early 1930s, the major timber industry operations that followed Ratcliff's original mill had done just that. Houston County's densest virgin forest, decimated.
Gone. You want to talk about a landscape that needed help. Enter the federal government, in the thick of the Depression, with a plan to put men to work and put the land back together at the same time.
The Civilian Conservation Corps — the CCC — set up Camp F-4-T right here on this very site, built out between 1933 and 1934. And in 1935, the Davy Crockett National Forest was established in this area, giving all that work a name and a future. Now, what those CCC workers accomplished out here is worth slowing down for.
They constructed fire towers to watch over a forest that was just beginning to breathe again. They built roads. They took an old sawmill pond — the ghost of Ratcliff's industrial operation — and developed it into a public lake, complete with recreational facilities.
And then, because the math of destruction demands a serious answer, they planted trees. Not a few trees. Not a grove.
About three million trees. Three million. Ratcliff CCC Camp ran until 1941, when it closed.
But the trees kept growing. The lake stayed. The forest that stands here today in Houston County — that's the answer those workers left behind, planted one sapling at a time on ground that thought it had nothing left to give.
What the marker says
J.H. Ratcliff's 1880s sawmill and village here gave way to major timber industry operations that by the early 1930s had decimated Houston County's densest virgin forest. As part of federal efforts to restore the nation's natural resources, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp F-4-T was built at this site in 1933-34, and the Davy Crockett National Forest was established in this area in 1935. CCC workers constructed fire towers, built roads, developed an old sawmill pond into a public lake with recreational facilities, and planted about 3,000,000 trees. Ratcliff CCC Camp closed in 1941.