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by Hallie E. Bond
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the mountainous Adirondack
region of northern New York was one of the nation’s premier resorts.
The grand resort hotels, smaller inns, and boarding houses were concentrated
on the region’s many lakes, nowhere more so than on the two large
lakes on the region’s eastern edge. It is therefore not surprising
that Lakes George and Champlain became the sites of some of the earliest
experiments in the country in organized camping for children.
The First Camps
Ernest Balch, generally credited with starting the movement with his
Camp Chocorua in New Hampshire, felt that summers at resorts contributed
to softening up America’s youth. Elias Brown, founder of the Adirondack
Camp for Boys on Lake George agreed in his 1906 brochure.
Observe the boy at even a first-class summer hotel. There may be something
for him to do much of the time, but what does he learn, and how is he
better at the end of the summer?
Balch and Brown were among a growing group of educators who felt that
the United States needed to toughen up its boys in the great outdoors
in order to maintain its place in the world. Children needed a summer
away from the “dust, dirt, and dangers” of the city. An organized
camp was the ideal place for them.
Camp Chocorua opened in 1881. Just four years later, Sumner Dudley took
a group of boys from the Newburgh, New York, branch of the YMCA for a
week’s camping on a nearby lake. They fished, went boating, and
spent several hours a day in Bible study. Dudley found it such a valuable
experience for the boys that it became an annual affair. By 1891, he had
moved to a site on Lake Champlain. Camp Dudley, as it was named after
Dudley’s death, still flourishes near Westport, the oldest continuously
operating children’s camp in the country.
The Adirondack region was well suited for organized children’s
camps. It had an abundance of wild lands and waterways and was relatively
close to New York City, Boston, and other large cities from which most
campers came. By 1900, Adirondack camps were among the most influential
and well-known in the country, and Adirondack camp directors took active
and important roles in the national movement. In the past one hundred
and twenty years, over three hundred children’s camps have been
founded in the region. Seventy exist today.
In 1891, Camp Dudley seems to have existed alone in the Adirondacks
except for the brief existence of The French Recreation Class for Girls,
surely one of the first girl’s camps in the country. An 1896 brochure
for the Lake Placid camp promised outdoor exercise — walking and
rowing — all suitably chaperoned — and, of course, daily study
of French.
Aside from the French camp, most early camps in the Adirondacks, as
elsewhere in the country, were for boys. Since men were held to be the
moving forces in business and politics, it was their hardiness that concerned
the early camp directors most. Between 1900 and 1910 at least nine other
boys’ camps joined Dudley in the Adirondacks. Most were on Lake
Champlain or Lake George. Two, Adirondack Camp and Pok-O-Moonshine, are
still in operation.
The Progressive Movementin Education
The growth of new camps increased dramatically between 1910 and the
stock market crash. At least one hundred had taken root in the Adirondacks
by 1929 — twelve were founded in 1916 alone. The motivation for
this remarkable flowering was due to a period of general prosperity in
the northeast and the great optimism of the Progressive movement in education
— part of a new scientific approach to childhood.
The Progressives felt that children needed to learn to solve problems,
rather than just memorize information. Creative learning by doing was
better than rigid “book-learning.” Childhood education should
aim to provide miniature communities where children could learn to create
and foster a just society. John Dewey, the leading philosopher of the
Progressive Education movement, joined the faculty at Columbia University
in 1906, and Columbia Teacher’s College (CTC) became an important
institution in developing a philosophy of camping. Camps, as isolated
communities where the educators had twenty-four-hour control of the students,
were ideal for putting Progressive theory into practice. CTC students
founded and worked at many camps in the Adirondacks.
The founding directors of Camp Treetops (1921), for example, had studied
with Dewey. At Treetops, the children lived apart from the counselors,
to promote independence. There was no camp store, to promote equality
among the campers, and the daily program was self-directed, to encourage
initiative.
The Architectureof Children’s Camps
The scientific approach to child-rearing was also reflected in the architecture
of children’s camps in the Adirondacks. The development of sleeping
arrangements can be seen to this day across the region. In the early days,
when camping was closer to camping out, children slept in tents on wooden
platforms, just as they still do at Tanager Lodge on Upper Chateaugay
Lake. By the 1920s, practical concerns had led many camps to adopt permanent
structures, which were usually distinguished by access to lots of fresh
air. Small, home-like cottages were considered ideal at many camps. Fresh
air came in through lots of windows or, as at Silver Lake Camp in the
1940s, children slept on sleeping porches. A less expensive alternative
was a variation on the Adirondack lean-to, a structure with three walls,
a roof that sloped towards the back, and a front that was almost completely
open.
Another distinctly regional variation was pretty luxurious. Several
camps, such as Girl Scout Camp Eagle Island and Camp Navarac, both on
Upper Saranac Lake, were established in former “great camps”
— complexes originally built as private estates. There, campers
used the same guest cottages and lodges that had housed the movers and
shakers of New York society a generation before.
The Woodcraft League
Mounted in scrapbooks or hanging on walls at camps across the Adirondacks
can still be found the colorfully illustrated certificates of the Woodcraft
League, each signed with the wolf print signature of the League’s
founder, Ernest Thompson Seton. These certificates document the origins
of some of the earliest and most enduring camp traditions.
Like the early figures in organized camping, Seton was concerned with
a softening of the American character. His Woodcraft League, founded in
1902, was based on plenty of camping out and an eclectic mix of traditions
and rituals from Native American culture. In the Woodland Indians system,
Northwest Coast totem poles, Plains Indians teepees, and Woodland tribal
structure all existed happily side by side. Seton’s “Indians”
may seem at the least muddled and at the worst disrespectful a century
later, but Seton saw himself as honoring the nation’s first inhabitants
by identifying parts of their culture that he felt were superior to his
own.
The council fire, perhaps the most enduring and beloved camp tradition,
was a central part of Seton’s system of camp life. Seton’s
model of gathering around a campfire to share stories, recognize achievement,
and participate in ritual, survives in many Adirondack camps.
Adirondack camp directors of the 1920s adopted much from the Woodcraft
model for several reasons. Indian lore and crafts seemed to fit naturally
in the Adirondacks, and the children loved it. Seton’s version of
tribal government and communication also fit well with the Progressive
educators’ goals of community life.
Religious Affiliated Camps
Camps for Jewish Children
Almost one-fourth of the Adirondack camps founded before 1929 were attended
primarily by Jewish children. The Schroon Lake Camp for Boys, founded
by Rabbi Isaac Moses of Manhattan’s Reformed Central Synagogue,
was the first Jewish camp in the state. The boys of Camp Swastika near
Old Forge and the girls of Che-Na-Wah in the town of Minerva observed
Jewish dietary laws in the 1920s. (Camp Swastika was certainly named for
the Plains Indian symbol and was out of business before the symbol acquired
a much more sinister association.) Che-Na-Wah, a camp endorsed by the
Conservative United Synagogue of America, had both Friday night and Saturday
morning services.
Religious observance at Jewish camps relaxed considerably by the post-war
period. In the 1950s and 1960s, most Jewish camps had only one service
on the Sabbath and that was abbreviated or fairly secular in nature. Most
Jewish camps incorporated Jewish values in camp life, but basically they
had the same goals and programs as most of the Gentile camps. This was
in contrast to areas such as the Poconos and the Catskills, where Jewish
camps were established to teach religion and culture and strengthen the
Jewish community. Jewish camps were separate primarily because —
until well after the Second World War — Jewish children weren’t
welcome at most other camps.
Christian Camps
Relaxed religious observance was not peculiar to the Jewish camps. Just
as there were few Jewish camps founded by religious groups for religious
purposes, there were few “Christian” camps until after the
1960s. Many camps attended mostly by Christian children had regular Sunday
services — often at an outdoor “chapel.” These outdoor
chapels were part of a long tradition of seeing the Adirondack wilderness
as a special abode of God that goes back to the early nineteenth century,
Even more formal chapels incorporated nature. The chapel at Camp Jeanne
d’Arc, a camp on Upper Chateaugay Lake attended primarily by Catholic
girls, was built with one wall largely open.
Youth Organizations
From the movement’s beginnings in the 1880s, youth organizations
seized upon the camp model as being well suited to their aims. Although
the for-profit, private camps are the best known, the organizational camps
undoubtedly have served far greater numbers of children. The Girl Scouts
of the USA and the Boy Scouts of America have probably been the most successful
in this regard. Forty-seven Boy and Girl Scout camps have been established
in the region since 1918. A Scout historian estimates that 360,000-1,200,000
children have attended them.
The Boy Scouts of America was founded at almost the same time that organized
camping really took off in the Adirondacks, and it is no coincidence that
Scouting and organized camping share so much. The Boy Scouts of America
had its organizational beginnings at the YMCA family camp Silver Bay,
on Lake George, in 1910. British Boy Scout founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell
attended, as did Ernest Thompson Seton, who was named Head Scout. Scout
councils soon started establishing camps in the Adirondacks where their
members could practice their woodcraft and camping skills.
Adapting to Change
After World War II, the nation experienced a period of prosperity that
might have been expected to encourage a growth in Adirondack camping.
However, only eighteen new camps were founded in the decade following
the war and only twenty-three in the next fifty years. The lower numbers
of new camps can in part be attributed to a level of “camp saturation.”
Changes in American society also had an effect on camping in the Adirondacks.
Some camps changed their programs, and others simply closed. There were
many new things for children to do in the summers — particularly
organized sports. School programs became more specialized and rigorous,
sometimes calling for more summer study. Increased opportunities for women
were reflected in the programs of some girl’s camps.
Adirondack camps have tended to remain oriented towards nature and the
outdoors. Some, like Tanager Lodge, have hardly changed at all, right
up to the present. Campers there still play games outlined in Seton’s
Birch-Bark Roll (1902). But most other camps added activities, particularly
organized sports, often decreasing or de-emphasizing hiking and canoeing.
In the 1950s Moss Lake Camp for Girls offered classical ballet, riding,
dramatics, and sailing, and Camp Eagle Cove had enough boys playing baseball
that it had its own Little League.
There were few specialty camps in the Adirondacks, camps that concentrated
on one sport or skill. Of these few, music camps were the most numerous.
At Deerwood Adirondack Music Center (1943-1957), practice studios were
Adirondack lean-tos. Campers could further their formal education with
New York State Regent’s Exam credit for some of their music classes.
At the New York State Music Camp, (which began its life in a former hotel
in Otter Lake in 1947 and outgrew it in 1955 and moved to Oneonta), alumnae
remembered the drama that thunderstorms added to musical productions —
until the thunderstorms completely knocked out the sound system.
Ever since the days of the French Recreation Class in Lake Placid, Adirondack
girl’s camps have provided healthy, outdoor recreation and educational
opportunities to girls in the belief that they needed them just as much
as boys. In the 1950s, two Adirondack girls’ camps made a particular
point of designing programs that prepared the campers to take significant
roles in business and society. At Camp Greylock on Raquette Lake, senior
girls were expected to study their copies of the Sunday New York Times
and be prepared to discuss current events in the evening. It was a standing
joke around Greylock that “boys like girls who can discuss nuclear
proliferation, Vietnam, and integration.” Camp Navarac’s director,
Sara Blum, used The Little Engine That Could as the basis of every final
Sabbath service. Both camps were run by major figures in American Jewish
life. Mrs. Blum was a legendary fundraiser for Jewish educational and
philanthropic causes. Naomi Levine left Greylock in 1971 to become the
executive director of the American Jewish Congress. She, like Mrs. Blum,
closed her camp when she left rather than see it change direction.
Adirondack Camps Today
As we have seen, organized camping in the Adirondacks responded to changes
in American society with changes in programs and specialized camps. But
as a whole, camps in the region have always been traditional in their
approach. The factors that have given Adirondack camps their character
are its location and the land itself — the same factors that made
the Adirondacks ideal for camp programs over a century ago.
The Adirondack landscape itself, as remote and rugged as it is, has
helped keep organized camping in the region traditional. A system of region-wide
land use planning, which began at almost the same time as organized camping,
has kept development restrained and preserved large tracts of public land.
This is a particular boon to camps with significant trip programs since
there is so much wild land to explore. The Boy Scouts of America have
been particularly involved in combining use of public land with camp lands.
The national Trek training program got its start in the Adirondacks in
the late 1970s as the Voyageur program, which trained guides for Scout
groups planning trips through the region. The public can now use some
Scout camp lands, as well, as a result of cooperative use agreements with
the State of New York.
In 1932, Fred Hackett, founder and director of Camp Riverdale for Boys
on Long Lake, rhapsodized on the virtues of his camp’s location.
“This square mile of wooded land stretching back from a mile and
half of lake front, is a paradise for boys. Beauty reigns everywhere.
. . . Nature rarely affords an outlook more inspiring. The surrounding
woods with an infinite variety of forest life, are a constant source of
wonder and of learning . . . .”
While Hackett was speaking of his own camp, his descriptions of the
natural environment might apply to any number of camps in the Adirondacks.
Although Camp Riverdale closed in 1964, the woods, waters, and mountains
that inspired Hackett remain, helping to keep Adirondack camps focused
on the relationship of campers with the natural world.
Originally published in the 2003 July/August
issue of Camping Magazine. |
