Tuesday, September 13, 2011

garage, walls, seals and ccc road

Another action packed weekend on the mountain.  The rain cleared up last Tuesday and it took a couple days for things to dry out, but the walls upstairs and the garage are well underway.

[Its taking shape.]

On Saturday, Dad stopped by to help replace hydraulic seals on the loader; they were in dire need of repair.  By 6:30 pm, we had things wrapped up and he was on his way.

[A before shot; nasty, leaky mess.]

I squeezed in a couple hours road grading and ditch digging Sunday afternoon - all of the rain we got last weekend really did a number on the road.  If I can get the ditches dug and cleaned, drainage shouldn't be a problem for at least a couple years.  This makes the perfect segway for some interesting history about our road:

Labeled as CCC Road in Thaxton, VA, our private road is also known as Flat Top Mountain Road.  CCC Road was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) either during the 1930s or early 1940s.  As many of you already know, Franklin D. Roosevelt formed the CCC to provide employment for young men in relief families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression while at the same time implementing a general natural resource conservation program in every state and territory. (Source: Wikipedia)  The CCC was broken up into roughly +/- 1400 camps that were scattered across the country.  Each camp was assigned separate types of work projects; anything ranging from forest protection to wildlife management.

Although I've exhausted my research efforts online, I have reason to believe our road was established in an effort to protect the forest and prevent fires.  One of my neighbors often rides his four-wheeler by when I've been on the mountain.  As he passed one day, I flagged him down for a visit.  He pulled to a stop with a big smile and we started talking.  It turns out that close relatives of his were CCC enrollees and they had all worked on the construction of our road.  [I'll have to take some pictures of the culverts, its impressive; all of the rock appears to be chiseled by hand and stacked.]

So you would think that this would mean our road is public, right?  Wrong.  The CCC was known to do a quite a bit of work on private land even though the majority of their projects were performed in our state parks and national forests.

If you'd like to learn more, please reference Wikipedia for more information on the Civilian Conservation Corps.

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