Renovo at 150 – The CCC Riot
by Lou Bernard
RENOVO – First, let’s get the obvious out of the way: The Great Depression was bad. I know I should avoid making any controversial statements like that, but, darn it, I feel very strongly about this. And so did President Roosevelt. He knew it was bad, and people were poor, so he created the Civilian Conservation Corps—A sort of quasi-military camp of forest rangers who fought fires, built bridges and roads, found lost hikers, and did whatever other jobs needed to be done in the 1930s. The men were fed and clothed, and they got money to send home to their families.
There were several of these camps surrounding Renovo. The Hyner, Shingle Branch, Cooks Run, and Two Mile Camps were all in the neighborhood, which made Renovo the go-to place for fun and recreation when the men had a night off. Renovo is not Vegas, but when you’ve been living out in the woods with a hundred other men all week, it’s good enough. The men would come into Renovo for a night of enjoyment. It was a riot.
No, really. On June 23, 1937, it was an actual riot.
With Cooks Run and Two Mile both sending their guys into town on the same night, there was some conflict. An article in the Record the next day does not specify what the fight was all about, but they said,”The affair was the result of a feud of long standing between the boys from the North at one camp and the boys from the South at the other.”
Between the two camps, there were two hundred and eighteen guys running around, which can add up to one hell of a fight. Some of them had come from the camps with knives, pick handles, and pipes, which makes me wonder how far in advance they’d planned this riot. Others were unarmed, so they scooped up rocks. One group of guys went running into a nearby pool hall on Erie Avenue to grab pool cues, but some of the locals caught up with them and took the cues back, the game presumably not being over yet.
It all ground to a screeching halt with the appearance of Renovo Patrolman Clarence Keegan, who arrived and sent the guys running, Batman-style. With rioters running all over the place, Keegan did the somewhat sensible thing—He gathered up all the weapons that had been dropped, and returned to the police station.
Keegan turned all the weapons over to Chief Burgess Smyth, who somehow had managed to become police chief in Renovo in spite of having a very British-sounding name. (“Smyth. Burgess Smyth. Of the Arkey-On-The-Ward Smyths.”) Smyth was pretty certain that the rioters would find an excuse to start up again, because let’s face facts, if you’ve already begun to participate in one riot, you’re probably not good at knowing when to quit.
So Smyth called County Sheriff Bryerton, who came up to Renovo accompanied by several deputies, and they spread out throughout the town. This had the net effect of calming things down considerably, and most of the rioters went back to camp at that point.
By this time, a call had come in about a similar riot in progress a few miles away at Westport, and the sheriff and his men headed over there. By the time they arrived on the scene, things had calmed down considerably over there, too.
“No arrests were made,” the newspaper reported.
The camp commanders were called, and arrived to herd everyone back to camp. The decision was made, afterward, to not allow both camps to visit Renovo on the same night anymore, which was not altogether stupid, either. So from then on, only one camp was allowed into town per night, to avoid any future riots. What happens in Renovo, stays in Renovo.
