Cumberland Mountain State Park near Crossville on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau grew from the Cumberland Homesteads Project, a Depression-era federal resettlement effort approved in 1934. Workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration built the park’s early facilities, including Byrd Creek Dam, completed in 1938 to create Byrd Lake. Constructed of native Crab Orchard Stone, the dam was described as the largest masonry project ever completed by the CCC. Tennessee acquired the park in 1938 and opened it in 1940. Its preserved New Deal buildings and landscape, later recognized within the Cumberland Homesteads Historic District, tie the park’s recreation facilities closely to the social history of the 1930s.