The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Camp Briarwood sprawled like a small city across about twenty acres of open meadow, a mile or so from the eastern edge of Briar’s Swamp. On the flat plain below them lay an orderly arrangement of two dozen wooden buildings of similar construction, all single story, each painted a dark forest green with a brown shingled roof. They were laid out around a large rectangular parade ground, its grass neatly clipped, with a graveled road that traced another rectangle around the perimeter of the buildings. The place looked like a military compound, which it was, partly. That is, it was run by Army officers, and there was enough military discipline to keep the young men organized and working in an orderly way, although not as much as they would have encountered in a real Army camp.

As they would in the Army, though, the “enrollees” (that’s what the boys were called) were given free dental and medical care, free inoculations, and free meals and lodging and clothing. They received a wage of $30 a month, $25 of which was automatically sent home to their families, all of whom were on relief. For that, each boy traded eight hours of labor, five days a week. Everybody was there, as Captain Campbell said firmly, to do a job. An important job.

“Those are the administration buildings,” Ophelia said, pointing to two identical structures on the right. “And those are the barracks where the enrollees sleep.” She pointed to the left, to a row of four long green-painted frame buildings with doors at either end, each capable of housing fifty young men. “Beyond them are the officers’ quarters and the camp guesthouse. When I began working here, there were already 192 enrollees with more on the way, along with a half-dozen officers. Before the barracks were built, the boys lived in tents.” She chuckled. “I’m told that they were glad to move out of those tents. The barracks don’t leak. And they’re heated.” Which mattered in January, when the temperature could go as low as ten or fifteen degrees above zero.

“What do the guys do all day?” Sarah asked wonderingly. “Do they go to school, maybe?”

“They work,” Ophelia said, remembering what the captain had told her. “That’s what they’re here for.”

Ophelia knew that when the boys arrived, most of them had never held a steady job—and their dads weren’t holding steady jobs, either, thanks (or no thanks) to the Depression. Many of them had roamed around the country, catching rides on freight trains, which meant avoiding the railroad cops, sleeping in cardboard boxes in hobo jungles beside the tracks, picking up whatever work they could find in return for something to eat. Ophelia found it frightening that a whole generation of young American men had grown up with no experience of making or building or creating something lasting, or trading their labor for a regular paycheck.

So for the enrollees, the camp’s regular daily and weekly work schedule was a crucial part of their learning. Monday through Friday, they were awakened before dawn by the camp bugler blowing reveille. Dressed, beds made, they went for calisthenics, then breakfast in the mess hall. Then they picked up their equipment and climbed into trucks that drove them wherever they were scheduled to work that day. At noon, the mess wagon took lunch to the job site. The trucks brought them back in time to wash up and get ready for supper, announced with another bugle call.

The camp had been built just a short distance from Briar’s Swamp for an important reason, Ophelia had learned. According to the “Mission Statement” posted on the wall in the quartermaster’s office, the first big work project was to drain the swamp to control the mosquitos and “to put the land into condition for continuous production of timber.” One or two people in Darling—including Bessie Bloodworth—were strongly opposed, since the swamp was a natural feature of the land and draining it would mean denying a home to many different species of wildlife. But that was definitely a minority opinion, and the mission was going forward. To get that job done, the boys spent their workdays digging drainage ditches, building roads, and clearing firebreaks. Once finished with that, there were other projects on the camp’s agenda.