As we celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary, the America250 initiative invites us to honor the workers who built our most iconic park experiences from the ground up. At Silver Falls State Park, a proud member of the Adventures Unbound family, we are celebrating the Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees who constructed the trails, the lodge, and the shelters that make Oregon’s largest state park the treasure it is today.
Company 611 and 88 Projects in the Forest
In 1935, President Roosevelt designated the Silver Falls area as one of only two Recreational Demonstration Areas west of the Mississippi, recognizing its exceptional natural value. That same year, CCC Company 611 arrived with 215 young men, mostly from Illinois, to begin transforming logged-over forestland into a public park. Later enrollees arrived from Tennessee. Together, from 1935 to 1942, they completed 88 projects that built Silver Falls State Park from scratch.
Their crowning achievement was South Falls Lodge, a 65-by-112-foot stone and timber building completed in the spring of 1941. Designed by state park employee J. Elwood Isted and approved by the NPS, the lodge featured a massive stone fireplace, a dining room ceiling open to the rafters, and myrtlewood furniture designed by Margery Hoffman Smith of the Oregon Arts Project, the same designer behind Timberline Lodge. South Falls Lodge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and remains the largest and most elaborately finished CCC building in the park.
CCC crews built the Trail of Ten Falls, now a beloved 7.2-mile loop with bridges, stairways, and rock walls leading to all ten waterfalls. They widened the natural pathways carved from soft sandstone behind several of the falls, making it safe for the public to walk behind walls of cascading water. They constructed a stone community kitchen, comfort stations, and two youth camps, Camp Silver Creek and Camp Smith Creek, that opened in 1938. Camp Silver Creek has been administered by the Salem YMCA ever since and is also listed on the National Register.
Walk Behind the Falls They Opened
Today, every step on the Trail of Ten Falls follows a path CCC workers carved by hand. Every meal shared at South Falls Lodge happens in a room the corps built from local stone. A plaque erected in 2007 honors their memory. When you walk behind a waterfall at Silver Falls, you are experiencing a moment made possible by Company 611 and the 88 projects that turned a logged forest into one of America’s great state parks.
To learn more about how we are celebrating the diverse stories behind America’s national heritage, visit America250 at Adventures Unbound.