An Administrative History-Camp Good Will, the CCC, and the Army

Camp Good Will, the CCC, and the Army

Camp Good Will (pages 26-27) continued in operation under the National Park Service. In the fall of 1931 Frank T. Gartside had proposed its relocation to Fort Hunt, Virginia, where more open space was available. The move did not occur, and it remained in Rock Creek Park north of Fort DeRussy. In 1933 its operator, the Family Service Association, reduced it from an, overnight facility to a day camp as an economy measure. Nearly a thousand Boy Scouts from Washington and Maryland convened at Camp Good Will in June 1936. The charity camp then spent its last summer there before moving to the Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area (now Prince William Forest Park) in Prince William County, Virginia. The remaining buildings received some use by Scout groups in 1937 before their demolition in February 1938. [64]

A Civilian Conservation Corps contingent then occupied the site, designated Camp NP-14, Rock Creek Park. Before and during its use of the area, the CCC performed a range of improvements in the park and Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. Its enrollees cleared the creek channel and stabilized its banks with riprap, planted trees and shrubs, built more than two miles of bridle path with log hurdles for jumping, and constructed an addition to the Park Police lodge, which had been built with a $13,500 public works allotment on Beach Drive below Joyce Road in 1936. [65]

During World War II the U.S. Army took over the site, naming it Camp King. It constructed roads and barracks, which it removed upon Its departure In 1944. The army was also active elsewhere In the park. The 93rd Detachment of the 212th Anti-aircraft Search Light Battery moved onto the old reservoir site at 16th and Kennedy streets with two trucks and four trailers a week after the Pearl Harbor attack. The War Department subsequently sought and obtained a permit to keep the unit there for the duration of the war, but the detachment left In November 1944, nine months before the cessation of hostilities. [66]

 

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