Officials honor members of company that built original lodge

[SHANEA]

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11/29/2006
Officials honor members of company that built original lodge  
Johnnye Montgomery<br>MRT Correspondent
Midland Reporter-Telegram  

FORT DAVIS -- After receiving a remodeling and rehabilitation that lasted almost five years, Indian Lodge formally marked its reopening on a beautiful sun-drenched day in late October with a festive celebration and ceremonial ribbon-cutting.

The ceremonies included speeches by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials, state Rep. Pete Gallego and supporters and friends of the lodge. They honored and congratulated the many who had worked so hard to bring about the remodeling.

And they paid special honor to D.S. (Lolo) Baeza and C.M. McMeams, members of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) company that built Davis Mountains State Park and Indian Lodge.

Baeza and McMeams were teenagers when they joined the CCC, an emergency employment program created in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide economic help to the thousands of families hit by the extended droughts and the Great Depression. The program offered employment to physically strong, unmarried and unemployed men, ages 17 through 25, who would create structures and enhance existing natural structures in national and state parks throughout the United States.

They were grouped into companies of 200 and slept either in wooden barracks or in tents. Besides the roof over their heads, they were provided with food, uniforms and a paycheck starting at $30 per month. Of that $30, they were allowed to keep $8. The rest was sent home to their families.

They worked from daylight to dark.

Baeza, 90, who now lives in Fort Davis, said his job was to make adobe bricks. He joined the CCC in 1934 at 18. He said the CCC was a godsend to his family of 12, who lived in Presidio.

"There was my mother and father, and seven boys and three girls," he said. "I had lots of friends who joined the same time I did, and we were glad to get the work."

The company he was assigned to at the Davis Mountains park was housed in tents. Baeza doesn't remember suffering from the cold, or the hard work.

"We would get up about six in the morning, eat breakfast, and then get to work. I didn't think the work was too hard. We kept working, but we talked and had lots of fun."

Baeza, whose family owns and operates the Baeza Grocery stores he started in Fort Davis, Alpine and Presidio, said he was happy to have been a part of the building of Indian Lodge. But he doesn't often think of those years as anything extraordinary.

"We were all trying to find work in those days," he said. "It (the CCC) gave us a good start."

McMeams, 93, who now lives in Sonora, said he, too, had a hand in building adobe bricks, although later he moved on to carpentry and rock masonry.

"The first thing we did was to build forms for those adobe bricks," he said. "They brought the dirt in on trucks, and we mixed it up with water and straw, and then some of the boys would take their shoes off and get up there and stomp (the adobe mixture) down. Then we'd let it dry."

He remembers the CCC utilized skilled craftsmen to direct and oversee the work.

"They had a rock mason come in from Fort Davis. I think he was about 70 years old," he said. "We boys handled the rock for him, but he chose it, every piece. When we got the rock all cut the way he wanted it, we started putting it all together, and we didn't have to touch another rock with a hammer. That's how good he was."

He said while the work was long and hard, they were all young and strong, and had fun while they worked.

He said Indian Lodge's Black Bear Restaurant is so named because of the black bear that his company kept as a pet for a short time.

"This bear had been caught as a cub by a rancher, who kept him in a pen, but the rancher got tired of having to feed him, so he turned him loose," said McMeams. "But the bear wasn't used to foraging for food, so he would come down to our camp and turn over our garbage cans.

"One night one of our boys had been to town and when he came back to camp late that night, he came face to face with the bear. The bear ran one way, and he ran the other."

McMeams said that he had several jobs during his tenure with the CCC.

"When they found out I was a carpenter, and knew what I was doing, they gave me a crew and made me a straw boss, and we put up a little cottage down in the park that is still standing. That was the first thing we built."

Another job was to build the scenic road that winds up the hill to the lookout point where you can see old Fort Davis, the town of Fort Davis, and the distant mountains all around. Although he's suffering from arthritis, McMeams would like to retrace the steps he took building that loop.

"I want to come back here sometime with a camera and walk along that road," he said. It was a beautiful place then, and it still is.

"It feels good to know you had a part in something like that."