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Highlands Today

'Tree Troopers' Have Their Day

Kathy Waters/Highlands Today

From left: Altha Sawyer, Ellen Faber and Joyann Rehberger look for crafts to buy on Saturday at the annual CCC festival at Highlands Hammock State Park.

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By Gary Pinnell | Highlands Today

Published: November 4, 2007

SEBRING — Dorothy Harris, the Highlands Hammock State Park ranger, was describing all the artists and exhibitors at the CCC Festival when Nancy Dale, a local historian, walked up, a small, elderly man in tow.

"This may have been the man who the statue was modeled after," she said, and started telling his story.

In front of the Civilian Conservation Corps Museum, there's a bronze of a CCC worker on a four-foot stone pedestal, shirtless, his right hand resting on an axe. He's about the same size as the man in front of her, wearing a floppy boonie hat all the CCC boys used back then.

"We'll have to get you to take your shirt off and get a picture," Davis smiled.

So, what's your name?

"Gordon Pearce. I'm from Fort Myers. I was born in Mulberry," said Pearce, 85. As an 18-year-old, he worked at the Hammock CCC camp during the summer and fall of 1939. He stacked lumber from the sawmill, which was used to build the museum and the Hammock Inn restaurant, and he helped build the trails through the swamp, trucking in dirt on wheelbarrows.

So how hot was it? "It was bad," he admitted. "But I was a Florida cracker, and we were used to it."

He was joking about being the model for the statue, he explained. Dale and her sister asked him if he was the model, and he replied, "Well, I could be." Both were about five feet, six inches tall, slightly built, and Pearce really did look like the bronze boy.

After he left the CCC camp, he went home and picked oranges for a year, and when WWII started, and Pearce joined the Navy.

CCC Museum

Inside, former CCC boys were greeting guests and talking with each other. One was Norman Welch, 83, of Lake Placid, who was born and raised in Hollywood. When he was 15, his family needed the money, so he dropped out of the ninth grade and went to work at West Summerland Key, 50 miles north-northeast of Key West.

"We had to wear mosquito nets over our hats," Welch explained. That's the floppy khaki cap that today might be called a fishing hat. "We had to wear long pants too, and gloves."

That was during the hottest part of the summer, of course. And to make sure the mosquitoes couldn't get inside the clothing, the pants were bloused inside the boots, military style.

Welch's outfit dug ditches from the ocean to the swamps. When the salt water infiltrated the stagnant pools, the mosquito larvae died. He was a truck driver, and they also brought in the boulders for the rock walls that still line the roadways today. The rock revetments kept the bridges from flooding, washing away the dirtwork.

How much did CCC boys make?

"Thirty dollars a month," Welch said. "They gave us $5 of it, and they sent the rest home." Where it bought food for his brothers and sisters. Back in the Depression, families desperately needed that money.

Welch went back to Hollywood and eventually joined the Army, training at MacDill Air Corps Base in Tampa for an eventual position as an air-to-ground radioman for the bombers that invaded Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Italy.

Both Welch and Pearce learned valuable lessons from the CCC. Away from home for the first time, they learned how to manage their own lives. And they didn't just get along with the rest of the boys, they formed a camaraderie that would be instrumental when they joined the military and saved the world.

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