YATES CENTER — When Charlie Puckett marched with other Civilian Conservation Corps workers into a long, wide draw southwest of Yates Center to dig what would become Lake Fagan, the 20-something local resident never dreamed someday his name would be etched on a memorial wall.
It will, as will many of the other 600 CCC workers, provided Linda Call can find their names.
A new Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism office building on a knoll overlooking the lake will be dedicated June 9. The new building is on what was the CCC campground during the lake’s construction in 1933-1935.
A stone monument, compatible in structure to four-foot-tall stone pillars that line a road across the lake’s dam, will recognize the CCC workers’ contributions, as will displays on walls of the office building.
Call, a Woodson County history activist, has made it her mission to find the names of all the CCC workers.
“I’ve got 300 already,” she said Thursday
afternoon. She encouraged anyone knowing names to contact her at 602 S. Kalida in Yates Center, by phone at (620) 433-1213 or by email at [email protected].
With the building’s dedication just over two months away, Call is eager to finish her task — “I guess you’d call me coordinator” for the dedication — and pull all, including the names, together.
Two archeologists from the Kansas Historical Society, Bob Hoard and Tricia Waggoner, were at the lake Thursday mapping the campsite in a follow-up to a November visit.
“It’s push-button archeology,” said Waggoner, as she zeroed in an electronic transit on a computerized standard Hoard moved to various points on the hillside where the CCC workers camped. A concrete pad was the CCC workers’ shower room, but other buildings, including 40 railroad boxcars that were sleeping quarters are gone, their only vestige a row of sandstone chunks windrowed as a terrace to curb erosion.
The map will be a part of the tribute in the office building, along with artifacts found on site.
With the help of Don Henkle, former Iolan now of Wichita, and his metal detector, Call found some artifacts last fall, including a 1932 penny, not worn much having been lost within a year or two of its minting. Money in any amounts wasn’t a common possession of CCC workers and finding even a penny was a bit of a surprise.
A part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the CCC was a public works program for unemployed, unmarried men from families receiving relief, the term of the day for welfare assistance. Those enrolled were 17 to 23 and provided unskilled manual labor for conservation and natural resources projects in rural areas on land owned by federal, state and local governments.
Lake Fagan, named for Ben Fagan, who donated land for its construction from his ranch, now is known as Woodson State Fishing Lake. The lake, with 180 surface acres, sits in a 2,885-acre tract — the state added land over the years — that is an expanse of prairie and timber.
TWYLA ROLLER, a Yates Center resident and niece of CCC worker Charlie Puckett, remembers when the lake was dedicated on July 4, 1938, a month after it was opened to fishing.
“It was the first time I never saw fireworks,” said Roller, 85. “Every time one would go off, we’d all say, ‘Ahhh!’”
She and other celebrants watched the fireworks show — “I’ll never forget the last one; it was like a big waterfall” — from the west side of the lake and enjoyed a picnic as part of the celebration.
