This whole park — the roads, the first cabins, the very idea of it — was born in the hardest years this country ever had, and built by young men who had nothing. Let me tell you about them.
It was the 1930s, the depths of the Great Depression. A quarter of the country was out of work, and among the worst off were the young men, millions of them idle, hungry, drifting. So President Roosevelt started the Civilian Conservation Corps — the CCC — and the idea was simple and fine: take those young men, feed them, house them, pay them, and put them to work healing the land. Building parks. Planting trees. Making beautiful public places that would outlast them all.
And a company of those CCC boys came right here to this raw stretch of Gulf coast in the 1930s, and they built Gulf State Park. They put up cabins and trails and — the crown jewel of the time — a grand beachfront casino and dance hall, a place where folks could come and dance by the sea. The park officially opened in the spring of 1939, one of the very first state parks Alabama ever had. Those young men earned thirty dollars a month, and most of it got mailed straight home to their struggling families.
The old casino is long gone now, taken by the storms like so much else here. But the park those boys started is still here, still giving people a place to dance and swim and rest by the water, ninety years on. Not a bad thing to build when you started with nothing but your own two hands and a country that needed you.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided · Public domain
