I
was born and reared in Saline Co., Missouri. At 16 years of
age I enrolled in the CCC and was sent to Salisbury Missouri.
One crew or section as we were called worked in the 10 acre
forest tree nursery weeding, watering, cultivating the small
seedlings. As this was a soil erosion camp, our work was to
prevent soil erosion in farmers' fields and meadows. Ditches
were graded, bottoms and banks rounded and dams constructed
of osage orange hedge, as we called it, by driving a double
line of posts across and in the banks. The space between, we
filled with smaller pieces of hedge, limbs, branches, etc. It
was then packed tightly and bound tight to the posts on either
side with heavy wire.
In
late autumn we dug up the little locust seedlings, tied them
in bundles and dug trenches and heeled them in for protection
from freezing during the winter months. During the winter we
went to the nearby river bottoms where there were thickets of
small willows. We cut these from 1 /2 to 1 1 /2 in. diameter
into approximately two foot lengths, tied them into bundles
and stored them for the winter. In the spring we took the willows
and the locusts to the ditches where we built the dams and planted
the locusts along the banks. Then while there was mud in the
bottoms we drove or pushed the willow sticks into the bottom
hoping they would sprout and grow into trees to halt erosion.