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Among tens of thousands of federal workers laid off— Camp Nelson National Monument lost 25 percent of staff: an administrator, a park ranger, and an archeologist. 

These former employees told the Jessamine Journal their stories of heartbreak from losing their jobs and the details of the skilled work that Camp Nelson has now lost.

The administrator and archaeologist will only be referred to as their job title as they requested their identities be kept anonymous. 

One of the two archaeologists at Camp Nelson was laid off. The archeologist worked in the resources department at the park, specifically in Cultural Resource Management (CRM). She had been there as an archaeologist for only three weeks before getting fired.

The archaeologist is currently finishing her dissertation for her PhD. She’s spent ten years studying archeology, with eight years spent in the field or as a lab director for fieldwork in Northwestern Belize. She’s also worked as a teaching assistant and lecturer of record at the University of Kentucky.

Being fired from Camp Nelson was truly traumatic for the archaeologist, she said. Receiving the same email as the administrator, it claimed their skills were “not what we need” and “it’s not in the public interest to keep you employed.” The archaeologist said she has been struggling with these claims and is fighting the urge to internalize them. 

“This was the career I’ve been building toward and the one I always wanted. Being in public lands, whether it was the National Park Service (NPS) or the Forest Service, as an archaeologist, was the ultimate goal for me. So, I had just reached the career I had been working for for almost a decade, and then having it ripped away like this was traumatic. And there are not many specialty archeology jobs in this area. It’s been difficult for me to find employment elsewhere. Especially [nearly having earned] my PhD, most people are telling me I’m too qualified.”

One retail business told the archaeologist she was overqualified and that she’d be unhappy at the job. But she must put food on the table for herself and her high school student.  

Before getting the archaeologist cultural resource management position in January 2025, she had been at Camp Nelson for almost a year as a student pathways park guide in interpretation and education. She said she started here to get her “foot in the door with public service and the NPS.”

While working in interpretation, the archaeologist “got nothing but outstanding performance reviews. I was always the first person in the building, even when I moved to resources. I was always there before everybody else. I was 15 minutes early. I left late. I believe in the work. I believe in protecting parks, and I believe in expanding what we know about this incredible place here in Kentucky, and I was excited to be able to get that work done quickly.”

In her cultural resource management position, the archaeologist was responsible for the archaeology side of compliance. She mainly ensured everything going on at Camp Nelson complied with Section 106, also known as the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. This act requires each federal agency to identify and assess the effects its actions may have on historic sites.

“Any kind of federal undertaking that uses federal dollars, at the NPS, that’s everything from interpretation programs to trails, has to go through compliance first,” The archaeologist said. For example, she added, “They’re trying to expand the septic tank for the bathroom, that has to go through compliance, and I was involved in the cultural compliance for that.”

The archaeologist said that since Camp Nelson is a major archaeological site, staff cannot disturb the grounds without an archaeologist first analyzing the area. 

This compliance has many moving parts and is time-consuming. “It’s actually a very long process always. Even with both of us working on it, it still takes a decent amount of time per compliance project,” the archaeologist said. 

“I’d look at what surveys have been done in the area and what was found in those surveys. We’d have to talk to the facilities manager and see how they plan on disturbing the ground; then, I write out a big project description about how this undertaking will affect all these different places. We have to do [projects] without ground disturbance or where ground disturbances have already happened so as not to disturb any archaeological resources,” she said. She then writes up a “big project description report,” creates maps for the project, then if the project required “full-compliance,” she’d have to write a letter to the state. 

Camp Nelson still has one archaeologist left who handles natural resources and environmental resources within the resource management department. Until the fired archaeologist joined, the other archaeologist was a “one-man band.” “They hired me on as an archaeologist to handle all of the cultural resources so that she wouldn’t have to also do that because there’s not enough time in a day to do everything yourself,” the archaeologist said, adding that now, the Camp Nelson archaeologist is again a one-man-band. 

“Things won’t stop, they’ll just slow down… The resource manager still at Camp Nelson has a lot on her plate, so expanding a trail and surveying for a trail might not be the top priority, so the trail systems might not be expanded as fast as they could be otherwise. Or, because it’s one big archaeological site, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about Camp Nelson that we could find out about by excavating certain places,” the archaeologist said. 

With less than a year left on her dissertation, the archaeologist said she will return to academia and “see what happens four years from now with public land.”

“Right now, I’m a single mom, and my kid is in high school. Part of working CRM in the private sector is leaving home for ten days and then getting four days off. So many of those projects take you all over the surrounding area, and I can’t do that with a kid in school and no childcare. I can’t leave my daughter for ten days at a time. That’s why I’m not exploring the private sector right now; it would be incredibly difficult to make it work. I have looked, and there are no jobs available in CRM right now in Kentucky that would allow me to stay home with my daughter.”

The fired Pathways park ranger, Taylor Boss, is a senior at Asbury University majoring in sociology and history. She started applying for the position in the Spring of 2024 and worked full-time throughout last summer until she started school again in the Fall. She was planning to return to a full-time position that summer. She was fired at 7:25 p.m. on February 14. “Nothing good happens at 7:25,” Boss said. “I like to say Elon Musk broke up with me over email on Valentine’s Day.”

“It’s a tiny little staff, but our Superintendent Ernie and the Chief of Interpretation, Steve, was like, ‘Hey, we care about you; if there’s a problem, we want you to come to us. If there’s a conflict, we want you to come to us,’ That kind of environment right off the bat was amazing. 

“It was really important work. A lot of what we did was collect the names and the biographies of all these soldiers, which otherwise would have probably been lost to history. Looking for the people who are overlooked by history was a big part of it.” Boss said. While at Camp Nelson, she had already finished one soldier’s biography. 

Boss recounted meeting park visitors who had no knowledge of the historical site. She became emotional remembering helping the junior park rangers visiting to learn and collect their badges with their families that had driven across the country.

“Because we’re such a tiny park, and we lost [three] people, that’s huge. And there were big parks that lost maybe one or two people because some of them just didn’t have anybody that was [that] new, so for such a small park and such a young park, it kind of just like [feels like a punch,]” Boss said.

Before she was fired, Boss was writing a biography for a soldier who died a few months into the war. “Because of his death, I have records of his wife’s pension, which span throughout her entire life. There’s so much information on her.” Boss’ former supervisors offered to still publish the biography if she finishes it. “I would like to publish this one if I can manage it.”

The administrator said about the importance of interpretation, “There are 1,000 ways that interpretation works within the NPS. It’s so multifaceted it’s hard to list all the things we’ve done. [Boss and the administrator when she was in interpretation ] have done transcriptions and we were trying to find new sources. Because the site is so new, there’s not a ton of research about it. So, having a research background, I was able to find tons of [information] that the park didn’t have. That’s how it is with every person who comes into interpretation; every person brings a new perspective and a new way to think about the site. Losing people from the site, you lose all of those perspectives.” 

It’s been an emotional time for Boss, but she’s feeling more pain for her coworkers and fellow National Park workers who have lost their jobs. “They are a different breed. The people who become park rangers have wanted to become park rangers since they were little kids. They’re the most dedicated people,” Boss said, continuing to describe a video where a park ranger wears their ranger hat in every situation– including the birth of their child. “They’re wearing the hat, and the baby will be wearing a little hat, and I’m like, yeah, that is what they’re like. Because I was so new to the (NPS) scene, I wasn’t so much in that world but I saw so much of that [dedication]. Like, all of these people are losing THEIR jobs?!! Sure, I’ll get another job,” Boss said.