What was the connection between Waldport's CO camp and the Beat Generation? | Waldport CPS Camp 56

When I first stumbled across the connection between a remote World War II work camp on Oregon's windswept coast and the legendary Beat Generation, I thought it was internet folklore. But after diving deep into archived letters, poetry manuscripts, and historical records, I realized the truth is far more remarkable than most literary historians acknowledge. If you've ever wondered how the counter-culture movement really began—or why pacifists and poets share such intertwined histories—the story of Civilian Public Service Camp 56 near Waldport will change everything you thought you knew about American cultural rebellion.

What Was Waldport's CPS Camp 56 and Why Does It Matter?

Civilian Public Service Camp #56, better known as Camp Angel, operated from late 1942 to December 1945 along the central Oregon coast, four miles south of Waldport. This wasn't just another wartime labor camp. It became the unlikely birthplace of a creative movement that would fundamentally reshape American poetry, art, and counter-culture consciousness.

Here's what made it extraordinary: While roughly 50,000 conscientious objectors served in various noncombatant military roles during WWII, about 12,000 were assigned to CPS camps. Most spent their days planting trees, building roads, or fighting fires. But at Waldport, something unprecedented happened—a small group of artists and writers transformed their mandatory service into a cultural revolution.

The Fine Arts Group: Pacifism Meets Poetry

The camp housed approximately 100 conscientious objectors at any given time, most content to fulfill their work obligations quietly. But among them emerged a core group of 10-20 creatively-minded individuals who established what became officially known as the Fine Arts Group at Waldport. After completing their mandatory 51.5 hours of weekly manual labor—planting over two million trees, crushing nearly 10,000 tons of rock, building fire trails—these men spent their evenings writing, printing, and performing.

They weren't just passing time. They were laying the groundwork for the San Francisco Renaissance.

William Everson: From CO to Beat Friar

At the heart of the Fine Arts Group stood William Everson, a poet who would later become Brother Antoninus, famously known as the "Beat Friar" of the 1950s San Francisco poetry scene. Everson's journey epitomizes the Waldport-to-Beat-Generation pipeline that most literary scholars overlook.

Born in Sacramento in 1912, Everson arrived at Camp Angel already recognized as a talented poet. But Waldport transformed him. Alongside fellow poet Glen Coffield, Everson helped establish a creative infrastructure that defied the camp's isolation. They found an old printing press in a Waldport secondhand shop and founded the Untide Press—a name chosen to satirize the camp's official newsletter, The Tide, which they considered too conservative and stodgy.

The Untide Press: Revolutionary Publishing

The Untide Press published poetry booklets featuring work by camp members and outside contributors, including the fiery antiwar poet Kenneth Patchen and iconoclastic author Henry Miller. This small press operation became a laboratory for the experimental, politically-engaged poetry that would define the San Francisco Renaissance a decade later.

The San Francisco Connection: How CPS Camp 56 Seeded a Movement

After the war ended in 1945, many Fine Arts Group members migrated to San Francisco. They didn't just show up—they arrived with experience in collaborative art-making, small press publishing, and integrating pacifist philosophy with creative expression. This background proved foundational to what became the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the mid-1950s.

William Everson continued his evolution, eventually joining the Dominican order as Brother Antoninus in 1951. His unique position as a monk-poet made him a bridge figure when Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other Beat Generation writers arrived in San Francisco. The Beats were drawn to the city partly because it already had an established counter-culture of poets, performers, and small presses—infrastructure built largely by former CPS camp members from Waldport.

Consider these direct connections:

• Broadus "Bus" Erle from Waldport co-founded the New Music Quartet in 1948, bringing avant-garde performance to the Bay Area
• Kermit Sheets founded the Centaur Press in 1949 and San Francisco's Interplayers Theatre in 1962, creating venues where Beat poets would eventually perform
• Adrian Wilson, who received a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1983, became one of the most respected book designers and fine arts printers, teaching craft skills to the next generation

Glen Coffield and the Poetic Resistance

While Everson grabbed more headlines, Glen Stemmons Coffield (1917-1981) represents another crucial thread connecting Waldport to broader counter-culture movements. Born in Prescott, Arizona, Coffield declared himself a conscientious objector and was transferred to Camp Angel where he became a central figure in the Fine Arts Group.

Coffield's poetry, published through the Untide Press, explored themes of nonviolence, individual conscience, and resistance to institutional authority—ideas that would become central to Beat Generation philosophy. His collection The Horned Moon was the second publication of the Untide Press, establishing a poetic voice that challenged both militarism and literary convention.

What's often overlooked is how these CPS poets created a model for living: work your day job (even if it's tree-planting as alternative service), then dedicate your nights and soul to creative resistance. Sound familiar? That's essentially the template Kerouac, Ginsberg, and other Beats would follow in the 1950s—working menial jobs while pursuing their literary visions.

The Untide Press: More Than Just Books

The Untide Press (1943-1951) wasn't merely a hobby press—it was a philosophical statement. In a time when most publishing reinforced patriotic narratives and traditional literary forms, Untide published work that questioned war, authority, and artistic orthodoxy.

Published authors included:

• William Everson
• Glen Coffield
• Kenneth Patchen
• Bill Shank
• Jacob Sloan

The press operated on minimal resources with a mimeograph machine and secondhand equipment, yet produced work that circulated among pacifist communities, progressive churches, and literary circles nationwide. This DIY ethic—making art with whatever's available, outside commercial publishing structures—became foundational to Beat Generation practice.

More than publishing poetry, the Untide Press created a distribution network connecting conscientious objectors, pacifist activists, and literary experimentalists across America. When the war ended and members scattered, they carried this network with them, particularly to San Francisco.

Why Oregon History Matters to Counter-Culture Understanding

Oregon's role in counter-culture history remains underappreciated. Most accounts of the Beat Generation start in New York with Columbia University connections or jump directly to San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. But the Waldport CPS camp represents a missing link—a place where pacifist ethics, artistic experimentation, and community-building practices were tested and refined before being transplanted to urban settings.

The camp's location matters too. Situated on Oregon's central coast in the Siuslaw National Forest, Camp Angel offered dramatic natural beauty that influenced the artistic sensibilities developing there. The rain-soaked forests, dramatic Pacific coastline, and isolation from mainstream culture created conditions for intensive creative work and philosophical development.

Today, you can visit the Waldport Heritage Museum, which houses the original workroom building where the Fine Arts Group created their art. Moved to Waldport in 1988, this structure serves as a tangible connection to a pivotal moment in American cultural history.

The Broader CPS Context: Alternative Service During WWII

To fully appreciate Waldport's significance, you need to understand the Civilian Public Service system. Created through collaboration between the U.S. government and historic peace churches (Church of the Brethren, Society of Friends, and Mennonites), CPS offered conscientious objectors alternative service instead of military duty or prison.

CPS participants worked without pay except a $2.50 monthly allowance, logging 51.5-hour work weeks for the war's duration plus six months. The justification? Returning soldiers should have first access to jobs. This economic exploitation created resentment but also solidarity among COs.

Camp #56 focused on forestry work—tree planting, road building, fire suppression. During its first year, men planted more than two million trees in the Blodgett Tract (logged for spruce during WWI), crushed nearly 10,000 tons of rock for roads, built three miles of fire trails, and helped fight seven forest fires across Oregon and Washington.

But not all COs were religious conservatives content with manual labor. Many were political or philosophical objectors who wanted to apply pacifist ideals beyond ditch-digging. This tension created space for the "schools" that emerged at various CPS camps:

• Virginia camps studied nutrition and health
• Pennsylvania camps focused on race relations
• Oregon's CPS #21 in the Columbia Gorge examined pacifist living approaches
• Waldport's Camp 56 became the center for fine arts

How Waldport Influenced the Beat Generation's Core Values

The connection between Waldport and the Beats isn't just biographical—it's philosophical and methodological. Consider these shared characteristics:

1. Rejection of Mainstream Values

CPS objectors refused military service based on conscience, accepting social stigma and economic hardship. Similarly, Beat writers rejected suburban conformity, corporate careers, and conventional literary forms.

2. Community-Based Art Making

The Fine Arts Group operated collaboratively—writing, editing, printing, and performing together. This mirrors the Beat practice of collective reading, writing sessions, and mutual critique that defined North Beach coffeehouses.

3. DIY Publishing Ethics

Untide Press demonstrated that meaningful literature could be produced outside establishment publishing houses. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books and other Beat-era presses followed this model directly.

4. Integration of Art and Life Philosophy

Waldport artists didn't separate creative work from ethical commitments. Their pacifism informed their aesthetics. Similarly, Beat writers saw literature as inseparable from how they lived—their experiments with consciousness, sexuality, and spirituality weren't just subject matter but lived practice.

5. Spoken Word Performance

The Fine Arts Group produced plays and musical performances, establishing oral/performative poetry as central to their practice. This directly prefigures the Beat poetry readings that made figures like Allen Ginsberg famous.

The Artists Who Bridged Two Eras

Beyond Everson and Coffield, Camp Angel housed remarkable talent:

Clayton James became an internationally renowned sculptor, carrying the camp's artistic ambitions into the fine art world.

Kemper Nomland Jr. became a modernist architect in Los Angeles, applying aesthetic principles developed at Waldport to physical space design.

Adrian Wilson stands out particularly—his book design and printing work earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983. Wilson's attention to craft, typography, and the book as physical object influenced how Beat-era small presses approached production.

These individuals didn't just succeed in their fields—they brought Waldport's ethos with them, creating institutions, teaching students, and building cultural infrastructure that made the 1950s-60s counter-culture possible.

What Happened to Waldport's Literary Legacy?

The camp closed in December 1945, but its influence rippled outward for decades. The original Fine Arts Group workroom building now sits at the Waldport Heritage Museum (320 NE Grant St, Waldport, OR), offering visitors a chance to stand where this remarkable creative community worked.

The Untide Press continued operating until 1951, outlasting the camp itself and publishing work that documented the CPS experience while pushing literary boundaries. Original Untide Press publications are now collectors' items, housed in special collections at the University of Oregon and other research libraries.

Many former camp members remained connected, corresponding throughout their lives and acknowledging how Waldport shaped their artistic development. William Everson, particularly, returned repeatedly in his writing to those years, recognizing them as formative despite—or perhaps because of—their difficulty.

Why This Story Matters Now

In an era of renewed interest in resistance movements, alternative communities, and the relationship between art and activism, the Waldport story offers valuable lessons:

1. Creative resistance works. The Fine Arts Group didn't stop the war, but they created art that challenged militarism and built networks that outlasted the conflict.

2. Geographical isolation can foster innovation. Removed from cultural centers, Waldport artists developed distinctive approaches that proved influential when transplanted to cities.

3. Ethical commitments enhance rather than limit creativity. The COs' pacifism didn't constrain their art—it gave it purpose, urgency, and coherence.

4. Infrastructure matters. The presses, performance spaces, and publications created at Waldport provided templates for how counter-culture movements organize practically, not just ideologically.

5. History has hidden chapters. The standard Beat Generation narrative erases crucial context. Understanding Waldport restores complexity to that story.

Exploring Waldport Today: A Literary Pilgrimage

If you're planning an Oregon coast history trip, Waldport deserves inclusion for its counter-culture significance. The town sits along Highway 101, making it accessible while retaining the quiet character that defined the area when CPS #56 operated.

The Waldport Heritage Museum offers the most direct connection, housing the actual Fine Arts Group workroom. The museum also features exhibits on local logging, fishing, and indigenous history, providing context for understanding what life was like for COs working in the area.

Nearby, you can explore the Siuslaw National Forest where camp members planted millions of trees—trees now mature, creating the landscape we enjoy today. The Blodgett Tract, between Waldport and Yachats, offers hiking that connects you physically to the same environment these artists inhabited.

The Legacy Continues: From Waldport to Today

The story of Waldport's CPS Camp 56 challenges simplified narratives about American cultural history. It reveals that the Beat Generation didn't emerge from nowhere—it built upon foundations laid by conscientious objectors who refused military service while serving their communities through labor and art.

These men demonstrated that resistance can be creative, not just oppositional. They showed that ethical commitments strengthen rather than limit artistic expression. And they proved that cultural movements need infrastructure—presses, performance spaces, networks—as much as they need vision.

For those interested in Oregon history, counter-culture movements, or the origins of Beat Generation literature, the Waldport story offers essential context. It's a reminder that transformative cultural moments often begin in unexpected places—like a work camp on the Oregon coast where young poets planted trees by day and revolution by night.

The legacy of Camp Angel lives on not just in literary history but in ongoing questions about art, ethics, and resistance. When contemporary artists self-publish, create outside institutional structures, or integrate activism with creative practice, they walk paths first cleared by William Everson, Glen Coffield, and the other members of the Fine Arts Group at Waldport.

Their story deserves to be told—and remembered as a crucial chapter in how American counter-culture was born from the soil of conscience, watered with Pacific rain, and grew into movements that continue shaping our world today.

© 2025 Toni Bailey All rights reserved.