Built From the Land: Documenting Devil’s Den State Park in its Natural State

Landscape architecture professor Kimball Erdman (in center wearing black hat) teaches a group of students about the CCC’s legacy at Devil’s Den State Park. (Photo by Chieko Hara)

When landscape architect Kimball Erdman joined the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in 2009, he had never spent time in Arkansas. Erdman studies cultural landscapes, documenting historical sites so they can be preserved for future generations. He was not sure what he would find in the state.

Colleagues told him to visit Devil’s Den State Park, where in the 1930s and ’40s the Civilian Conservation Corps used stones and logs from the surrounding landscape to build cabins, roads, trails and overlooks. And they advised him to read the work of Frank Burggraf and Karen Rollet-Crocker, two former Fay Jones School landscape architecture professors who in the 1980s brought attention to the CCC’s work at Devil’s Den.

The park was one of the first places Erdman visited after he arrived in Fayetteville. One spot in particular captured his attention.

“I fell in love with the overlook pavilion,” Erdman said. “The structure, the terrace, the wall – everything works with the site and grows out of it. I was always hoping to someday be able to work on it.”

The overlook at Devil’s Den State Park. (Photo by Chieko Hara)

That opportunity came last year, when Erdman completed a detailed Historic American Landscapes Survey of Devil’s Den. Working with U of A’s Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, Erdman and his students documented the overlook pavilion, which a 1935 National Park Service publication deemed worthy of a Pulitzer Prize in architecture “if and when created,” along with the cabins, culverts and trails that have survived, CCC workers’ encampments long gone, and acres and acres of rolling, heavily wooded landscape crossed by trails.

They used drones and lasers to precisely map the 2,200-acre park. Their work is collected online with illustrated histories, hundreds of historic photos, interactive maps and 3D models. The site, ccc.cast.uark.edu, launched last year and has been recognized with numerous awards.

“Kimball is probably now the single most authority on Devil’s Den,” said the park’s assistant superintendent, Tim Scott, who has worked there since 1984.

Tim Scott (right), assistant superintendent of Devil’s Den State Park talks to students of landscape architecture professor Kimball Erdman (left).

Burggraf and Rollet-Crocker in 1989 published their work on the CCC at Devil’s Den in a spiral-bound book produced with a dot-matrix printer, entitled “Manmade Elements in Natural Settings: The CCC in Arkansas.” That self-published book had a profound impact on the park.

“I have a feeling it is partially responsible for the state of the park today. If they had not done their work, we would be dealing with a different landscape,” Erdman said.

The work of Burggraf and Rollet-Crocker was also essential for Erdman’s high-tech survey of Devil’s Den. It led his team to the primary sources that were critical for their work. And it is an example of how current U of A researchers build on the work of their predecessors to preserve and support the history and natural resources of Arkansas.

A Story Lost and Found

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the CCC in 1933 to create jobs during the Great Depression. The impoverished men who signed up were often unskilled and uneducated. They were paid $30 a month to build parks and recreation areas across America. In Arkansas, along with Devil’s Den, the CCC also built Petit Jean State Park in Conway County and Lake Catherine State Park in Hot Springs and Garland counties.

At Devil’s Den, the men lived in camps of 200. The CCC’s budget prioritized people over heavy equipment and materials, so the men looked to the land around them for logs and stone to build the infrastructure of the park. A handful of trained architects and landscape architects oversaw the work, teaching the men skills they could use when they left the CCC.

What the men built was designed to look natural and not distract visitors from the landscape. They embraced a rustic style that was already established at national parks like Yosemite in California and Yellowstone in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

The CCC ended abruptly in 1942, six months after America entered World War II in late 1941. The country needed the men to fight in Europe and Asia.

Members of the Civilian Conservation Corps kneel work on Cabin 6 (now called Cabin 8). (Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, courtesy of Karen Rollet-Crocker)

The men who built Devil’s Den used to gather at the park every other summer for a reunion. Scott, the park’s assistant superintendent, met many of the CCC alumni over the years until the reunions eventually fizzled out in the early 2000s.

“They were really great guys and proud of the work they did here,” he said.

The men never forgot what they accomplished with the CCC. But, for decades, America did forget.

The American historic preservation movement, which grew in the 1960s, changed attitudes toward the recent past. By the 1980s, the CCC’s work was recognized as valuable and worth honoring.

Rollet-Crocker came to the U of A in 1985 with an interest in preservation in small towns. She was soon enlisted by Burggraf in his research on Devil’s Den. They worked like detectives, tracking down maps and documents. Rollet-Crocker remembers once getting a tip that sent her to the Arkansas State Library in Little Rock, where on a shelf she found a stack of architectural and landscape drawings for Devil’s Den.

“Probably no one had looked at them since the ’40s,” Rollet-Crocker said. “I took my camera, I took a tripod, and I took as many pictures as I could, because I knew what we had.”

The work of Rollet-Crocker and Burggraf established that what the young men did at Devil’s Den with the CCC was important. It made clear that the creation of these parks was not haphazard, even though most of the workers were untrained. Today, Devil’s Den stands out as one of the most intact examples of the CCC’s work in the United States.

Rollet-Crocker, who retired in 2006, still lives in Fayetteville. Burggraf died in 2020.

CCC blueprints for a “rustic” picnic table at Devil’s Den State Park.

Preserving the Natural State

Erdman has devoted his life and career to preserving landscapes. Since arriving in Arkansas, he has also documented the CCC’s work at Petit Jean State Park and the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, located in Rohwer in Desha County and Jerome in Chicot and Drew counties.

“Every project we undertake is a service-learning opportunity,” he said.

Landscape architecture professor Kimball Erdman (left) explains a feature of Devil’s Den State Park to students.

Each summer, Fay Jones School undergraduate and graduate students help Erdman on these cultural landscape studies.

Lori Filbeck-Hart, who graduated last December from the Fay Jones School’s new Master of Design Studies program with a concentration in preservation design, assembled the research and photos of Devil’s Den before the field work. Filbeck-Hart, who received her Bachelor of Architecture from the Fay Jones School in 2005, grew up in Northwest Arkansas and owns the Bijou architectural firm in Springdale. Before working with Erdman, however, she knew nothing about the CCC’s work at Devil’s Den.

“It was kind of mind blowing that it happened so close to where I live, and I had never heard of it,” she said.

Learning about the CCC taught Filbeck-Hart lessons she uses in her own work. The CCC tried to thoughtfully blend its work into the landscape. Filbeck-Hart embraces that same philosophy of respecting what already exists when she works on renovations or additions to historic structures in Arkansas.

Erdman sees what he and others do in the Department of Landscape Architecture as integral to the original land-grant mission of the U of A to serve the people of the state.

“Almost every project that we do is for a community somewhere in Arkansas, where we are helping that community envision a better future,” he said. “I can’t think of a department on campus that embraces that mission more than landscape architecture.”