Refusing War, Affirming Peace: A History of Civilian Public Service Camp #21 at Cascade Locks

Chapter Three: The First Months: Organizing a Community

31 CHAPTER THREE The First Months: Organizing a Community Civilian Public Service Camp #21 at Cascade Locks, Oregon, officially opened on November 27, 1941, when nine men arrived, transfers from the CPS camp at San Dimas, California. They were welcomed by the camp director, the Reverend Mark Y. Schrock, and two COs who were already there, J. Henry Dasenbrock and Wayne Gregory. Dasenbrock had known Mark Schrock while growing up in Fruitland, Idaho, where Schrock was serving as the minister of the Brethren Church in nearby Nampa. When Dasenbrock learned that Schrock was the director of the CPS camp to which he had been assigned, he volunteered to help with the preparations. Schrock was living in Olympia, Washington, where he had been minister of the Church of the Brethren congregation prior to volunteering to work with Brethren CPS; Dasenbrock came to Olympia and slept on the living room couch for several weeks before traveling to Cascade Locks to help ready the camp.1 Since Wayne Gregory was a member of Schrock’s congregation in Olympia, he had also been available for work in the early weeks. The site at Cascade Locks had been a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp which Mark Schrock had chosen because it had excellent facilities, was easy to reach by road or rail, and had a wide variety of Forest Service work projects in the Mount Hood National Forest. It was a spectacular site, located on Gorton Creek with the Columbia River to the north and the walls of the Columbia River gorge to the south. By the time the camp opened Schrock had spent a year preparing for this assignment. In early winter 1940 he and his family traveled to Brethren, Michigan, for several months of CPS training. After they returned to Olympia, Schrock in- (LC Schrock 3) 32 Refusing War, Affirming Peace J. Henry Dasenbrock posting a notice on the camp bulletin board. (Davis-Kovac) View of CPS #21 from the south. The dining hall is in the foreground and dormitories to the right. The Columbia River and Wind Mountain are in the background. (LC Schrock 1) vestigated several possible camp sites in the Northwest before settling on Cascade Locks.2 The evening of December 5, seventy-one men arrived by train from California. Dasenbrock and others from the camp met them in the dark at the Cascade Locks railroad station and brought them to the camp in Forest Service trucks. The camp was actually located at Wyeth, Chapter Three: Organizing a Community 33 about eight miles east of Cascade Locks. Over the next seven weeks the camp population grew to 105. Eventually, the camp housed about two hundred men, and approximately 560 spent some time there before it closed in July 1946, making it the largest camp in the CPS system. (A complete roster can be found in the Appendix.) It was also in service longer than any other camp in the Brethren system. Much of the first seven weeks was consumed with cutting and splitting wood to feed the endless appetite of the more than thirty-five wood stoves that provided the only warmth for the camp. As Mark Schrock wrote, “Through fog, rain, wind, and snow the relentless crews swarm and toil like pack rats driven by a collecting habit that has become obsession.”3 Schrock estimated that nearly five hundred cords of wood were cut and ricked. In mid-December 1941 a side camp was established on nearby Larch Mountain. About twenty volunteers from the main camp at Wyeth, led by assistant director Albert Bohrer, moved to a small, rundown CCC camp partway up the road from the Columbia River Highway to the summit of Larch Mountain. The main reasons for the side camp were to put crews closer to areas of potential forest fires, and to build and staff a new fire lookout tower on the top of Larch Mountain. Later, a smaller lookout tower was also constructed on nearby Pepper Mountain. Early work at the side camp included renovating the camp and cutting firewood for the winter, but felling snags (dead trees that were considered serious fire hazards) and planting trees soon became Firewood splitting crew. (Davis-Kovac) 34 Refusing War, Affirming Peace Larch Mountain Side Camp. (Davis-Kovac) Building the fire lookout tower on Larch Mountain. (DavisKovac ) the major activities along with building the lookout towers. These activities were directed by an enthusiastic forest service...