The White Pines State Park Lodge and Cabins are located in rural Ogle County, Illinois near the village of Mount Morris. They were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The Cabins are one of two Historic Places found in or near Mount Morris, the other is the Samuel M. Hitt House. The Lodge and Cabins are part of a National Register Multiple Property Submission, they were submitted with several other state park lodges, all designed by Joseph F. Booton.HistorySeparate entities from White Pines State Park, The Lodge and Cabins are privately managed as a "wilderness getaway," thus, they are privately owned and operated.With the Great Depression in full swing the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) sought to relieve the work needs of unemployed Americans. The National Park Service sought to work with state governments in an effort to meet those ends. Many of the projects the CCC was involved with were construction projects. The project at White Pines was originally meant to be the construction of a lodge building. Two hundred men worked on the State Park construction project at one time, in the years 1933-1939, many of them World War I veterans.After the lodge was completed, it was decided to build a restaurant and breezeway onto the lodge building. Logs for most of the project were shipped via railroad from as far away as Oregon and Washington state, unloaded in Stratford, Illinois and dragged to the construction site by teams of horses. The CCC project also completed sixteen one room log cabins and three four-bedroom cabins. The work crews also built picnic shelters, trail shelters and foot bridges. Only the logs for the cabins came from another source. They were purchased from a salvage company that had purchased utility poles from a defunct utility company at the price of 30 cents a piece.
