Barber, Katrine

This collection is composed of oral history interviews with conscientious objectors from the Waldport Civilian Public Service Camp 56 (the text of this note was adapted from the final report for this project by Katy Barber, Jo Ogden, and Eliza Jones titled: Camp 56: An Oral History Project). During World War II, 12,000 conscientious objectors did “work of national importance under civilian direction” as part of the Civilian Public Service (CPS) program, an alternative service to military participation. The CPS camp at Waldport, named Camp Angell (also spelled Angel), was the fifty-sixth camp to open, and it operated from October 1942 to April 1946. Camp 56, which was administered by the Church of the Brethren, was located about four and one- half miles south of the town of Waldport, Oregon. It sat just east of Highway 101, which runs along the West coast of the United States. The Pacific Ocean, just through some trees on the west side of 101, could be heard but not be seen from the camp itself. The four dorm buildings, kitchen, and dining area in which the men lived, cooked, ate, did office work, prayed, met, and engaged in the fine arts were set in a muddy forest clearing. To the east of the camp lay the steep hills of the Siuslaw National Forest, in which the men felled snags (e.g., cut down dead trees which posed safety and fire hazards), built roads, and planted trees for the U.S. Forest Service. The two towns closest to the CPS camp were Waldport to the north and Yachats just over three miles to the south.

In 1942 the Forest Service re-assigned nearly two dozen men from the Church of the Brethren’s Cascade Locks, Oregon CPS camp (Camp 21) to fight fires on the Oregon coast, and decided to open Camp 56 at Waldport in October. Work of “national importance” done in the Siuslaw National Forest by the men from the Waldport camp included re-planting acres that had been destroyed in the 1934 Blodgett Burn, building roads into the forest, and acting as fire lookouts during the dry summer months. The camp’s population fluctuated with transfers which were frequent in CPS, but residency averaged 120 men at any given time. Most of the objectors who were interviewed for this project were from religious farming communities in the Midwest, but several came from more urban, and less religious, homes.

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