Between the Covers

Softcover. Oblong small quarto. Ribbon-tied embossed flexible card wrappers. Photograph mounted to front cover above title caption. 175 black and white gelatin silver photographs mounted to rectos and versos. 140 of the 175 photographs are "gem" prints and measure smaller than 1" square, mostly portraits of individual CCC members. The remaining 35 are of various snapshot sizes. Majority of prints captioned in white album pen. Title caption to front board faded. Print mounted to front heavily creased, torn with section of loss from upper center. A few small portrait prints appear lacking. Overall about good or better.

Documenting the 1933-1934 activities of Civilian Conservation Corps Camp No. 1533 located in Coshocton, Ohio near the Tuscarawus River in the East-Central portion of the State, approximately 75 miles East of Columbus. Highlighted by 140 diminutive portraits of Company members, most noted by last name beneath. The album is also notable for its many, clear views of living and work conditions
of The Company including additional, larger, group portraits of Company Squads, a view of its baseball team, two shots of members wrestling one another (while drunk, according to captions), and various images of its erosion control projects.

Little has been published on the work of the 1533rd, though the online "James F. Justin Museum," an impressive repository of CCC archival material, hosts excerpts from the unpublished journal of engineer Roy Udell Clay, recording, in specific detail, his work with the Company in Coshocton: "[...] We were to build experimental devices for the control of run-off and devices to determine what happens to rainfall with respect to transpiration, percolation, and run-off. I was given a crew of 25 white junior enrollees and a set of plans for a lysimeter battery. A lysimeter battery consists of three concrete boxes. These boxes were built on the surface of the ground and then sunk into the earth for a depth of eight feet without disturbing the soil on the interior of the box. The interior surface of each box was 1/100th of an acre and was built to conform to the natural grade of the surface. After the boxes were precisely located the earth was removed from around the exterior of the boxes. Concrete walls and a floor were then poured as well as a concrete roof. The 1/100th of an acre of soil in each box was left exposed. Each box had a metal pan beneath. A metal collecting device caught all run-off from each box. Collectors were placed under each box to catch the percolation. Of course rainfall measuring devices were installed nearby. One box was located on a set of Toledo scales so sensitive that it would record the weight of a fly landing on the box surface. Crops were rotated on each box surface. The first lysimeter battery was built in Texas and I built the second. On this project I had an assistant foreman by the name of Shamhart. This was quite a project considering that we were using unskilled labor."

A rich visual record of the CCC and its environmental conservation.

Item #412831