Camp Rabideau is a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) site established as part of the “New Deal” in 1933 to help alleviate unemployment during the Depression. Located in Beltrami County, it operated until 1942. It later became a satellite campus for University of Illinois forestry and engineering students; a Native American learning center; and an educational center for Chippewa National Forest visitors.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced his “New Deal” during the Great Depression as a plan to improve the economy and put Americans back to work. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established in 1933, provided more than 3 million young men with opportunities to work in forestry and soil and water conservation.
To qualify for the CCC you had to be an unemployed, unmarried man and a US citizen between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. You had to enlist for a minimum of six months, and many re-enlisted after their first term. The income earned by the workers helped keep many families from starving. They were paid thirty dollars a month and had vocational education opportunities. From the thirty-dollar stipend, recruits sent twenty-five dollars home to their families. The government provided room, board, clothing, and tools.
By 1935, the CCC program had established 2,650 camps throughout the United States. From 1935 to 1941, a total of 166 camps were located in Minnesota, with an average of fifty-one camps active at any given time. Camp Rabideau F-50, located just south of Blackduck on Beltrami County Highway 39 in the Chippewa National Forest, opened in 1935.
The camp sat on a 112-acre tract that was purchased in 1934. CCC Company 3749 of Bennett Springs, Missouri, arrived in 1935 to build it. The original layout included barracks and officers’ quarters, a mess hall, a recreation hall, a hospital, and an education building, among others. Because the structures were not built to be permanent, only thirteen of the twenty-five original buildings remain standing as of 2019.
Company 708 of Bena took over the camp in January 1936. Overall, an estimated 300 men spent time working at Camp Rabideau, with most coming from Northern Minnesota. Due to CCC segregation policies, there were no African Americans at this camp. Young Native American men participated in separate camps through the CCC Indian Division program.
The CCC program gave the men on-the-job vocational training. The work projects conducted by the men of Company 708 included surveying, building roads and structures, planting trees, and wildlife management in the Chippewa National Forest. In their limited free time, the men took advantage of evening education classes and participation in recreational activities such as the Audubon Club and playing basketball. The company stayed there until the program ended in 1941, when Congress discontinued funding the CCC due to the need to finance World War II.
The camp stood vacant until 1945, when the University of Illinois–Urbana leased it for civil engineering and forestry education programs. The lease agreement required that the students work on projects to modernize camp facilities. They updated the electrical and sanitation systems, stabilized ceilings, converted buildings to apartments for staff, and updated the heating from wood burning to oil stoves. The university’s program continued for twenty-seven years, ending in 1973 when the lease expired.
The camp became the Rabideau Conservation Academy and Learning Center in 2010. The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe sponsored the creation of the camp, which provided young adults and children with opportunities to learn with a focus on job training and higher education.
In 2019, Rabideau serves as an educational center for the National Park Service (NPS) and is open to the public. Guided tours are available from May through September. The education building and picnic site can be reserved for meetings or special tours.
Camp Rabideau was named a National Historic Landmark on February 17, 2006. It remains one of the best-preserved of the nation's many CCC camps, with restoration an ongoing project.