A stone tepee I spotted at the corner of a state highway and a county road near Munising, Michigan reminded me of some structures I'd seen elsewhere in the state as remnants of the work of the Civilian Conservation Corp during the 1930s.
There was a good reason for that!
We passed the monument multiple times over several days as it sat along the route along a county road we had to take in to Munising from a small resort about 10 miles out of town where we stayed this past summer.
Naturally, I had to stop and take a closer look at the monument.
This monument, built in 1931 by brick masons that included members of the CCC, commemorates the dedication of the original Hiawatha National Forest.
The government largely acquired the original Hiawatha Forest between 1924 and 1931, with President Herbert Hoover designating a large tract of land between the towns of Rapid River and Manistique on Lake Michigan to Munising on Lake Superior as a national forest. Today, this land pretty much comprises the Western Unit of the Hiawatha National Forest.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Government administered Marquette National Forest, dedicated by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1909, with the Huron National Forest as the Michigan National Forest from 1918 until 1962. This land, between Lake Ignace on the Straits of Mackinac and to the shore of Lake Superior just west of Sault Sainte Marie became part of the modern-day, million-acre Hiawatha National Forest as its Eastern Unit in 1962.
The stone tepee pre-dates the merger of the forests, and was the first of many CCC activities in the area.
Marquette architect D. E. Anderson designed the monument in the shape of an Ojibwa tepee with bronze tepee poles rising through a bronze cap atop the pyramidal structure of stones characteristic of the region's geology. The monument also has a bronze plaque noting Hoover's dedication of the forest and the date, as well as plaques bearing the names of the counties covered by the original Hiawatha National Forest.
The CCC started work at the original Hiawatha Forest in earnest a couple of years after the dedication.
CCC workers planted a stand of red pines south of the monument in 1935. In 1979, the park thinned the 11-acre tree plantation as part of a timber sale.
Camp Wyman sat about .7 miles east of this intersection of present-day highway M-94 and Forest Road 2254 (also known as Buckhorn Road). The camp, founded in late 1933, was home to CCC enrollees who trained in skills like tree planting and fire fighting under the supervision of experienced local men. The CCC crews also worked on hazard reduction, telephone line construction and forest inventory during their time at Wyman. The CCC abandoned seven camps in Michigan's Upper Peninsula that included Camp Wyman in early 1936. Little trace of the camps remains today.
Check out the Hiawatha National Forest's site for a scenic route listing this marker, Camp Wyman, and several other CCC-related sites in the park.
The Hiawatha National Forest has many other attractions, including lighthouses, waterfalls, abundant spring wild flowers, wildlife to look for and five National and Scenic Rivers. The area, especially around Munising, has an especially excellent reputation as a premiere place to go for winter sports like cross-country skiing and snowmobiling.
Meanwhile, the legacy of the CCC and its work at Hiawatha National Forest lives on as children and grandchildren of one of the CCC brick masons who built the original stone tepee offered to repair the aging monument with its deteriorating mortar. Mason Benjamin Franklin Cook worked on the monument in 1931. His children, Ruth Cook Blow and Larry Cook (a semi-retired mason himself), enlisted the help of Larry's three sons to complete the repairs in 2005.
Interested in learning more about the work of the CCC and the CCC camps in Michigan? Check out Proud to Work: A Pictorial History of Michigan's Civilian Conservation Corps by Annick Hivert-Carthew.
© Dominique King 2014 All rights reserved
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