The coal stove sits at the far end of the building at Bear Brook State Park, alone and cold to the touch.
Near the center of the narrow, high-ceilinged structure is a picnic table with silverware and coffee mugs resting on upside-down plates, looking like a reserved table at an outdoor wedding.
A few feet from there is a lone cot, sheets tucked tightly, and a footlocker, in an area where dozens of cots and dozens of footlockers once sat, lined up in neat rows, resembling Army barracks.
Just another museum with artifacts from another time? Not really. This site, once affiliated with the Civilian Conservation Corp – a Depression-era program that gave jobless men a chance to rejoin the workforce – is special, because none of the nearly 3,000 camps built nationwide in the 1930s have what the one here has: a direct, visual map to the past.
Christina Barton, the park’s manager, has her public relations message ready and waiting, telling me, “This is the most intact CCC camp in the United States. It’s incredible how well preserved this camp is and how these buildings have lasted so long.”
There are 13 buildings still standing from a program that ran from 1932 to shortly after our entry into World War II, in 1942, when everyone left to fight the Nazis and the Japanese. All but one building is still operational. Most are used for storage.
The crown jewel is the bunkhouse, the museum with the coal stove and cot. It’s open on Saturdays, free of charge, starting in June and ending in October.
But if you want to see it during the offseason, call Barton, a 25-year-old Epsom native, who will shovel snow out front and then unlock the green, paint-peeling door to let you in.
“Last year was my first for being the manager, and I wanted to see this place open for anyone who wanted to see it,” Barton said. “I hate to say to people, ‘Sorry, I don’t have anyone here to open it for you.’ If they want to see it, I will dig out the porch.”
She calls this her “dream job.” She wore the vintage green uniform of a park ranger, complete with a New Hampshire Parks and Recreation badge and the Old Man of the Mountain profile shown between the wording.
Barton knows her stuff. Before giving me a tour of the museum, she gave me a lesson. The CCC provided more than 3 million men with a renewed sense of worth. They built the infrastructure needed for recreation projects. They planted trees. They built hiking trails, roads, damns and cabins that would later be used for children’s summer camps. They turned small brooks into larger ponds. They cleared the way for sandy beaches. They created campgrounds.
Meanwhile, each worker was given a bed, a roof over his head and $30 per month, $25 of which was sent home to family.
In short, they were responsible for the foundation that became Bear Brook State Park.
“People need to come and see this stuff,” Barton told me. “It’s our history. People come here to the park and enjoy the trails everyday, the camping in the campgrounds or in a cabin. This is how it all started. Without them, who knows? We might not even be here.”
The museum featured a biting chill on a cold, rainy day. That’s how it was for the men, who worked and slept there year-round. Summers were fine, but that old coal stove was the only source of heat during our cruel winters.
“Imagine being here in the winter time and being at that end of the building,” said Barton, pointing toward the area far from the heater, on the other side of the long building.
The feel of that era is everywhere you look. A time of hardship and worry. A time of sun-up to sun-down labor, hoping that the CCC, part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program, would help lift the economic disaster that had poisoned the entire county, leaving long bread lines and lost savings.
Walking from the stove toward the cot and beyond is like stepping into a history class. On the walls are the original tools of the day, a shingle tool, a sickle, a pickaxe, a two-man crosscut saw, the type lumberjacks used to cut thick tree stumps.
Inside the footlocker are the belongings of Albert Martel, his ranger hat and his heavy wool coat and his American flags. The walls are full of worn black-and-white photos, showing the men who worked at the camp, and more recent photos of reunions, showing silver-haired seniors, some in wheelchairs, who never forgot the importance of the CCC.
Another spot on the wall has a framed list of former employees who have passed away, people like Douglas P. Boyd of Concord and John R. Brown Sr. of Epsom, and Armand Lemoine of Pembroke.
In a glass display case sit canteens, winter hats, silverware and a mess kit, all original pieces from the era. On the floor next to the case are fuel and water pumps.
And outside are the buildings that have been maintained and set this CCC camp apart from all others across the country. Including the 28 that called the Granite State home and employed nearly 30,000 men. The chow hall is still there. So is the carpenter’s shop, the blacksmith’s shop and the forest rangers building. And a CCC-built children’s camp, closed since 2008, will be refurbished and open for business once again this summer.
“Look at any of the other state parks in New Hampshire,” Barton says proudly. “Who can say they have this large children’s camp, which we are lucky enough to open to the public?”
Thank the CCC for that. Thank it for the attractions and natural wonders in Bear Brook State Park.
Barton, for one, loves the historical significance, the opportunity to learn, the relief that the old coal stove provided to dozens of cold, tired men.
To Barton, that coal stove still cranks heat.
“I have so much appreciation for the museum, all these items, the building itself,” Barton said. “The history of this place is like, ‘Wow.’ I love people who come here and are as entranced with the place as I am.”