Millersylvania State Park, Historic state park near Olympia, United States
Millersylvania State Park covers 903 acres eight miles south of Olympia, with old-growth cedar and fir and 3,300 feet of shoreline on Deep Lake. The Civilian Conservation Corps built its trails, roads, picnic shelters, bathhouses and caretaker's home between 1933 and 1935, and most remain in use.
Squire Lathum homesteaded the land in 1855 and sold it to John Miller, whose family called it Miller's Glade before renaming it Millersylvania and donating it to the state in 1921. Civilian Conservation Corps Company 1232 began construction in mid-1933 and finished by July 1935, building trails, roads, picnic shelters, bathhouses and a caretaker's home. In 2009 the park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its preserved CCC landscape.
The park's buildings and pathways reflect the work of laborers from the 1930s who shaped the land with practical purpose. Visitors today walk trails and use facilities that have remained largely unchanged since their creation.
The park is open to visitors year-round and offers lodging and day-use facilities throughout the grounds. The site is easy to navigate on foot and provides camping, swimming areas, and boat access for various activities.
The park's old-growth forest still holds stumps marked by the notches where loggers inserted springboards to stand above the trunk's base. Remnants of a narrow-gauge railway and 19th-century skid roads lie on the grounds. The Miller family diaries also record a freshwater crab once found here, later extinct through overfishing by settlers.
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