Passport to Texas

 

This is Passport to Texas

On January 23 Mother Neff State Park, near Waco, celebrates its grand re-opening after completing the first phase of a construction and renovation project. Master Planner, Joelynn Barclay says among the new construction is a camping loop that encircles remains of a Civilian Conservation Corps encampment.

They had 40 or so little cabins for men to live in, and a cooking hall, and they had their own maintenance buildings, and they a well, and they had a shack to eat in. So, all of those sites were an archeological site. And at first we were going to put that behind the proverbial velvet rope: ‘Oh, don’t touch that. It’s an archeological site. It’s culturally sensitive.’ But, instead, some very forward-thinking work done by our cultural resources coordinator Diane Dismukes and Tony Lisle, said, ‘You know what? With a good enough study – because none of the buildings exist there anymore –we could study archeology that’s left there, and go ahead and fit a camping loop where that site was. That way, in the camping loop, when you’re sitting there at night around the fire, you can see the remnants of what the CCC left. And talk about how the people lived there and built the park down below, while you’re sitting and camping and having a great time. Talk about living history. Yeah, living in history.

There’s more information about the park and grand re-opening on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2015 at 12:00 am and is filed under State Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.