[Photo Album]: Civilian Conservation Corps Camp F-2, Company 701

Isabella, Minnesota, 1930. Hardcover. Near Fine. Oblong quarto measuring 13½" x 10½". String-tied full leather album. Contains 295 black and white or sepia toned gelatin silver photographs measuring between 1¾" x 2¾" to 6½" x 4½" with some captions. Album and contents fine.

A comprehensive Civilian Conservation Corps album showing the men of Minnesota's first camp. The men were assigned to Superior National Forest where they worked on fire prevention, conserved marshland, built buildings, conducted surveys, and more. The company was created with 10 men on April 5, 1933, the same day that FDR signed the executive order establishing the CCC. When it was first formed, it had several African-American members, though none are pictured in this album. The album contains a fair amount of group shots, both in and out of uniform, as well as several interior views showing the barracks, the mess hall, including one where it's decorated for Christmas, and one of the fireplace with FDR's portrait hanging above. Other images show the hospital including an interesting picture of a man holding a sign which reads "QUARANTINE SCARLET FEVER". Quarantines were the only way a camp could deal with contagious disease and these signs were also at camp entrances to alert visitors to the situation.

Many pictures show the snow-covered roads and grounds and buildings, some in the midst of construction; others show the men being loaded into, and loading equipment into, trucks, digging, posing with equipment and raising the flag. The album shines in its documentation of leisure activities with a concentration on hunting and fishing. We see men feeding a bear, snowshoeing (and possibly racing in snowshoes), canoeing and swimming, dangling dangerously over rapids and visiting a tobacco shop. Others show them hunting, with many images of strung fish and varmints, posing with special catches, and one of a man apparently ice fishing with a rifle.

A wonderful album, artfully created, fully documenting the work and play of Minnesota's first CCC camp.