Summer Camp

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Summer Camp

For over a century, summer camps have provided millions of American children with their first taste of the world outside their family and neighborhood. The first commercial camp began in 1881; at the end of the nineteenth century, a handful of camps served elite Protestant boys almost exclusively. In the early twentieth century, the industry extended and diversified its reach. At its peak in the prosperous years after World War II, about one in six children attended camp. Camp is still an important part of many children's summers: while the traditional eight week private camp is no longer as popular as once it was, in the late 1990s over eight million children and adolescents between the ages of five and seventeen attend a wide variety of camps—5500 overnight and 3000 day camps—each summer. While day camps, short-term overnight camps and specialty camps serve increasing numbers of children, many camps feature traditional activities that have varied little for generations: living in cabins with children of similar backgrounds; taking daily swims and engaging in other water and land sports, hikes and overnight trips; doing arts and crafts; singing camp songs and roasting marshmallows around campfires. The industry has reflected disparate and changing goals, but the basic premise remains the same: that camps foster community life, personal development, and skill-building, while providing retreats from the problems and dangers of the outside world.

Summer camp is a distinctly American invention, whose origins reflect the aspirations and anxieties of late nineteenth century middle and upper class life. First, as cities grew, particularly in the Northeast, industrialization and urbanization inspired some well-to-do men (and a few women) to travel to wilderness areas to experience the reinvigorating romance of nature, and its fortification for urban life. Second, concepts of child-rearing among the upper and middle class were in transition; as the birthrate among urban well-to-do families declined, parents devoted increasing resources toward providing a sheltered and longer childhood for their smaller families. Acknowledging that children had their own peer cultures, adults expressed anxiety about how best to supervise and guide them. Rural children had traditionally helped their parents on farms during the summer, but increasing numbers of urban children and upper class children had no set tasks over the long vacation. In addition, the first summer camps reflected the particular anxieties of their founders, a group of white middle-and upper-class Protestant men who worried about the effects of modernity upon elite boys' manliness. Youth leaders feared the enfeeblement of those who, they believed, ought by virtue of their class to lead the nation. Camp was to be an antidote to the "softness" of the modern work regime and vacations at resort hotels: a place where privileged boys would experience the toughening effects of outdoor life, albeit amidst the safety of select peers and adult supervision.

Given that camps claimed to be an antidote to modern urban life, it is unsurprising that they achieved their greatest popularity near the largest urban centers, particularly at lakes and mountains within a day's travel of the densely settled Northeast. While smaller camping districts—such as the Upper Midwest and the mountains of North Carolina—emerged in the early twentieth century, summer camps have always been most popular in the Northeast, where they first started. The Gunnery Camp near Milford, Connecticut (1861-1879) has long been cited as the earliest camp model. It was not a separate camp but part of the summer term of a boarding school; for two weeks each summer, the boys lived in tents by the sea and simulated the life of soldiers. Other early efforts included the North Mountain School of Physical Culture, northeast of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, run in the late 1870s for "weakly boys," and the first church-sponsored camp, run by the Reverend George Hinckley of Hartford, Connecticut during the summers of 1880 and 1881 near Wakefield, Rhode Island. Ernest Balch's Camp Chocorua, which ran from 1881 to 1889 on Asquam Lake, New Hampshire, was the first commercial organized camp. Chocorua provided a model that camps of all kinds would cite for years to come, in which children with similar family backgrounds lived together away from home, sharing leisure activities, chores, camp rituals and inside jokes.

Chocorua, like later camps, lauded the wilderness but took advantage of modern innovations. The boys made their own boats and did extensive chores around the grounds, but within a few years they were living in cabins instead of tents, and the camp had inaugurated a complex financial system to teach the boys about modern commerce. In general, while many camps started small, with a few tents and a rowboat, if they were successful they sheltered children from the wilderness that they extolled, and provided comforts and improved recreational facilities as quickly as they could afford them. From the 1880s onward, innovations have run the gamut from electricity to miniature golf courses, leading to countless discussions among camping professionals about what exactly makes a camp "campy."

At the turn of the twentieth century, the field of camping expanded to benefit the poor as well as the rich. Progressive Era reformers worried particularly about the plight of new immigrant children growing up in city tenements, where poverty and overcrowding bred malnutrition and disease. Hoping both to assert a moral control over potentially unruly new Americans, and to provide healthful and pleasurable activities in rural settings for needy youth, a variety of nonprofit and charitable organizations started their own camps. Settlement Houses, church groups, and charitable organizations all sponsored short trips to the country for poor urban children. At the same time, camping opportunities for middle class children grew as YMCAs, YMHAs and their female counterparts began to work more intensively with children and adolescents. By the 1910s, reflecting new models of athletic girlhood, increasing numbers of girls' camps opened. New youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Camp Fire Girls specifically exhorted children to camp outdoors. By the early twentieth century, boys and girls of many ethnicities and social classes were camping at their own facilities (as in other forms of commercial recreation, children of color experienced more limited camping opportunities).

As ideas about child-rearing and recreation shifted over the course of the century, so did camps' daily routines. Most of the very early camps had a decidedly religious character. Protestants, and later Jews and Catholics, saw in camp a means to reinforce their religious communities. By the 1920s, camping had expanded to serve a variety of interest groups, all of whom saw in camping communal possibilities that transcended their individual political, religious, and social differences. Zionists, Progressive educators, hiking enthusiasts, socialists, and military types all created camps in their own image. But they also were responsive to larger trends in children's recreation. During the First World War, many camps adopted military drill and army-style discipline. In the 1930s, influenced by the pedagogical theories of John Dewey, a countering discourse stressed creativity, social adjustment, and personality development. One enduring legacy is the place of Indian-style ritual. In the first years of the twentieth century, Ernest Thompson Seton's youth organization, the Woodcraft League, inspired many camps to "play Indian" by making teepees and totem poles, telling Indian stories by the campfire, and wearing moccasins and headdresses. Driven by nostalgia and desire for pre-modern "authenticity," many camps have continued to invoke Indian pasts.

Across the country, overnight camps flourished in the postwar years, as a generation of baby boomers grew to camping age. In 1948 the national umbrella organization, the American Camping Association, finally instituted national standards for camp accreditation, after decades of debate. But the years since have been rocky ones. Since the mid 1970s, more than 2500 camps, or about one in five, have gone out of business. In the late 1960s and 1970s, camp owners found themselves competing against not only trips to Europe but also the anti-authoritarian youth culture of that era. Camps near major cities and tourist centers have fallen victim to high expenses and the temptation of high real estate prices. In response, many traditional eight-week camps have inaugurated shorter sessions to accommodate parents who are scheduling their children's summers more tightly around competing interests, including joint custody issues and alternate family vacation plans. In addition, traditional camps now compete against newer specialty camps which focus on particular skills or provide specific experiences: computer skills, weight loss, gymnastics or soccer, and bike tours across the country. At the end of the 1990s, 75 percent of all camps were run by nonprofit groups and social service agencies, serving children of all economic classes. In other words, the popular image of the extended vacation at a private eight-week camp does not fully reflect the experience of most contemporary campers, for whom the average stay is one week at a non-profit camp. But in the popular imagination, camps represent sites for children's adventurous "coming of age," rather than quick trips. In films such as Meatballs (1979), Little Darlings (1980), and Addams Family Values (1993), camps are a place where children and adolescents embark upon voyages of self-discovery, friendship, and loneliness, pranks of all kinds, and, if they are teenagers, sexual and romantic exploration. For adults who once attended them, camps often represent a nostalgic reminder of childhood.

For over a century, disparate groups have held in common the belief that rural spaces are healthier and safer for children, and that camps in particular can be spaces of social transformation, in which adults can teach children the arts of acculturation and good (class, racial, ethnic, religious, political and gender-appropriate) citizenship before returning them to their homes. Collectively, summer camps have shown an ability to change with the times and to accommodate different and sometimes diametrically opposed groups. They provide a window into the expansion of children's recreation in the twentieth century, and to the changes in American social order that have enabled a widening range of communities to create children's leisure in their own image.

—Leslie Paris