Todd township, Mount Union borough

Seven Camps Of The Ccc

A swimming pool created by a CCC dam, captioned Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, July 1941, Farm Security Administration photograph.Edwin Rosskam, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF33-005210-M4 (LC-DIG-fsa-8a15977) Public domain

The Pennsylvania CCC Online Archive, kept by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, lists seven Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Huntingdon County. Six of them opened in the spring of 1933, between May 6 and June 16.

Camp S-59, Ross Farm, also known as Greenwood Furnace or Saeger Farm, opened May 6, 1933, worked on Greenwood Furnace State Park and closed in October 1935. Camp S-58, Bell Furnace, with its post office at Mount Union, opened May 30 and closed October 1, 1937. Camp S-60, Whipple Place, eighteen miles north of Petersburg, and Camp S-61, Diamond Valley, seven miles north of Petersburg, both opened June 5. Diamond Valley closed October 1, 1937, while Whipple Place was open at least until July 1, 1941. Camp S-57, Paradise Furnace, with its post office at Aitch, and Camp S-112, Detweiler, also called Martin's Gap, sixteen miles northeast of Huntingdon, both opened June 16. Detweiler closed December 15, 1937, and Paradise Furnace in 1941.

The seventh camp came later and had a different job. Camp SCS-9, Todd, was a soil conservation camp. It opened October 31, 1935, with its post office at Todd and its railroad at Mount Union, and it closed in 1938.

The archive also records how the camps reached the outside world. Diamond Valley and Whipple Place got their mail at Petersburg and their telephone through Alexandria. For Detweiler, the post office, telephone, express mail, telegraph and railroad were all at Huntingdon. The Greenwood camp's express mail and railroad came through Belleville.

One of the seven, Camp S-58, also left a record of its work in the flood of 1936. The Democratic Watchman of Bellefonte reported on March 27, 1936, that Mt. Union was badly damaged. The history of Company 2335, stationed at the camp, says that during the flood the company provided some 60 sets of bedding and cots to stricken residents of Mount Union, and that its surgeon, Lieutenant Benjamin Woro, worked night and day inoculating people in Mount Union and nearby communities against typhoid. It gives a total of 1,027 man-days and 118 truck days spent clearing wreckage, pumping out cellars, shoveling mud and other rehabilitation work, and it says many letters of commendation came in for the company's work during the flood. The county's 1937 sesquicentennial souvenir book adds, without naming any camp, that hundreds of Works Progress Administration employees and C. C. Camp boys attacked the problem of rehabilitation after the flood.

Checked and confirmed. Confirmed 2026-10-31 against the sources listed: every factual sentence in the first four paragraphs was tied to a verbatim passage, and it was confirmed that each passage is in its source. Where sources disagreed on a number, the number was left out. The paragraph on the 1936 flood was not part of that check. It rests on the company's own undated history and one 1936 newspaper sentence, both read from scanned pages, and on the 1937 souvenir book. The history does not say how many of its man-days were spent at Mount Union. The Mount Union Times and the Huntingdon Daily News for that week have not been read, so the number of men sent and any local figures stay open.

Sources