Saving Our Land
Saving Our Land
Rejuvenating the American spirit comes from our connection with our land, water, and air. Saturday, September 26th, is National Public Lands Day, when we celebrate our parks and all those who care for them. As the nation's largest single-day volunteer effort, it honors the bond between people and nature while caring for our shared spaces.
Two hundred and fifty years after the birth of the United States, it is worth remembering that one of our most powerful acts of national renewal didn’t happen during the Revolution. It happened in the 1930s, when a country reeling from economic collapse used the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to restore not just American landscapes, but the physical memory of America’s origins. Today, more than fifty museums and interpretive centers remind us that keeping our outdoors healthy is critical to our future.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., I always found tremendous tranquility in the woods. Today, I live nestled between two historic CCC sites: one in Fort Valley and the other at Wolf Gap. The first one in the U.S. was Camp Roosevelt designated for white enrollees and the other for African Americans. Their close proximity serves as a daily reminder of a complex past and a shared legacy of public service.
Few Americans today remember Roosevelt’s “Tree Army”—born in the hunger years of 1933 and disbanded in the shadow of 1942. In less than a decade, three million young men planted more than three billion trees, restored wounded lands, and built the parks and pathways that still cradle our footsteps. They carved Skyline Drive along the spine of the Blue Ridge, raised bridges, shaped trails, and left behind a geography of hope.
For more than a century, nations have understood that tending the land also tends the human spirit. Discipline, resilience, cooperation—these are the virtues the earth teaches those willing to work with their hands in the soil.
We celebrate the CCC for its pine forests, fire towers, and national parks. But one of its most transformative achievements was reviving the places where the nation first took shape. At a moment when Americans desperately needed stability, the CCC sent unemployed young men into colonial and Revolutionary sites, asking them to rebuild the tangible foundations of national identity. It wasn't nostalgia. It was nation-building.
Consider Saratoga, New York. Before the CCC arrived, the battlefield that turned the tide of the Revolution was almost unrecognizable. Farm buildings crowded the fields, brush swallowed the ridgelines, and a century of neglect had blurred the terrain. CCC enrollees cleared the land, worked alongside archaeologists to uncover entrenchments and musket balls, and built the trail networks visitors use today. Without their work, Saratoga might be a historical footnote rather than sacred ground where Americans can feel the weight of 1777.
In Pennsylvania, the CCC tackled the industrial backbone of independence. Hopewell Furnace, an 18th-century ironmaking village that supplied the Revolutionary army, had collapsed into ruin. The corps stabilized the furnace stack, rebuilt workers' homes, and restored the surrounding landscape, resurrecting an entire historic ecosystem.
In Virginia, their footprint stretched from Jamestown to Yorktown. Enrollees excavated 17th-century foundations, restored cemeteries, and helped construct the Colonial Parkway—a scenic corridor physically connecting the first permanent English settlement to the final victory of the War for Independence.
This work was never merely about old stones and timber. It gave a struggling generation a sense of continuity—a reminder that the country had survived severe hardship before and could do so again. Young men who arrived as desperate laborers left as skilled surveyors, stonemasons, and craftsmen.
As we debate how to teach history and make it matter to future generations, the CCC offers a timeless answer: history endures when it is visible, tangible, and accessible. Their work still stands 250 years after the founding. The question is whether we still value the foundation they fought for. Saving the land is prevalent today as it was almost a hundred years ago.
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