Company 788 of the Civilian Conservation Corps was formed at Camp Whiteside, Fort Riley, Kansas, on May 19, 1933, with members drawn from Kansas, especially the eastern part of the state. After conditioning at Fort Riley, the company was transferred to Park Rapids, Minnesota, where it worked on project S-70 at Camp Ruteledge, twenty-seven miles northwest of Park Rapids. Repeated calls for firefighting earned the company the nickname "Fire Devil," a name that remained in use even after its work turned to dam construction. On April 9, 1934, the company moved to Camp Kinney, fourteen miles northwest of Kalvesta, Kinney County, Kansas, where it replaced Nebraska Company 753 and continued building an earth fill dam. After that project was completed, the company transferred to Farlington, Kansas, arriving on June 6, 1935, at a camp three miles northeast of Farlington in Crawford County, officially known as SCS 10-L. There it worked on an earth fill dam about thirteen hundred and fifty feet long and sixty-five feet high, requiring two hundred and eighty-four thousand cubic yards of fill. The associated park, under the Kansas Fish and Game Commission, covered about four hundred and sixty-four acres, with one hundred and sixty-five acres to be under water at spillway elevation. The work also included roads within the park, a spillway two hundred and eighty feet wide, and clearing timber from the lake site, creating a recreational park intended to draw broad interest in southeastern Kansas because of its location and natural beauty.