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This is a list not of campsites
or camp facilities or legal entities, but of organizations and their
programs. It is not a snapshot of a century ago, but a celebration of
today's living elders of organized camping.
Tracing
the Organization
The
organization is like a human that grows, moves around, evolves, changes
names, produces offspring. Some of these camps are sub-organizations
within larger organizations or legal entities, but have still maintained
their separate organization and camp program.
As camps evolve
they may replace their facilities or even move to a new site, as most on
this list have done at some point. The camp is its people and its activity, the organized program.
That is what I have traced to the present.
Time,
lost records, fading memories all contribute to the imperfection of the
list. Each camp provided its own data. In some cases other literature or
records were located. Each camp was interviewed to make sure that it met
the "organized program" tests.
Camp
Test As
camping has evolved so has the definition of a camp. Today the definition
of camp has broadened considerably. A camp must be defined by the standard
of the day. The first criteria (membership in the ACA) is today's
standard. Are they camps today? But
were the older camps also considered camps in the past? Whose standard to
use? Today's or the standard of the day then? In the early days of
camping, it was much clearer what a camp was. So I have tried to use the standard
of the day. This presents huge problems with evolving definitions and
distance of time. In cases of uncertainty the test was simple: did the
camp call itself a camp then? Paradise Farms and Mont Lawn, as far as I
could tell, did not, and were placed on the Noteworthy list. Poking
Around The
ACA has the Pioneers of Camping Club which people there seemed to believe
was all I needed. It turned out not to be a list of the oldest at all, but
a list of camps that had been honored for 40 years of operation. So I ran
a broader search and went
through what history I could find and searched the full ACA database. With
a short list of camps that claimed founding dates before 1900, I started
contacting each camp individually. Most were quite interested in the
project. Many, unfortunately, had little documentation or if they did, it
was not readily available. But one thing was true of almost every camp.
Somewhere in its organization or among the alumni was someone (very often
a past director) who had researched the history. Finding
this "talking history book" was more difficult than you would
expect. Sometimes I had to call back five, six, seven times, before
learning how reach him or her. For those whom I pestered, I'm sorry, but I
hope you think, in the end, it was worth it.
Church
Camps
If
there is a flaw in this list, it is that it may have missed the church
groups that run a short, week-long summer camp. These groups may use
someone else's "campsite" or may own their own unobtrusive
property, but are too small to join the American Camping Association (ACA),
or simply have no need to as they do not reach beyond their own congregation. There may be among
them a few that have operated their camp program continuously since before
1900 and have maintained continuity of the program since then too. If
the ACA criteria were removed there may none or some that would qualify
for this list — if they could be located.
Myth
of the Oldest Camp
Dudley on Lake Champlain in New York seems widely recognized as one of the
oldest, if not the oldest. But it modestly does not to go beyond calling
itself the oldest boys' camp. It was a surprise, then, to find that it had a
sibling in Frost Valley YMCA's Camp Wawayanda. Both camp's histories
consider the pre-1901 Camp Dudley years as their roots. Prior to 1901, Camp Dudley
jointly operated under the supervision of the New Jersey and New York state
committees of the YMCA. Success had taken Dudley to 200
campers in 1900, stretching facilities. The NJ YMCA decided to
move back
to Lake Wawayanda in New Jersey, where the camp had been for 1886-9, with
the NJ Y campers and staff at Dudley. In 1901, the NJ Y actually operated
two camps: one at Wawayanda in July and one at Dudley in August. The
Wawayanda camp was called Camp Wawayanda and the Dudley camp was called
Camp Champlain. From
Camp Dudley's viewpoint, those campers from New York attended in July and the NJ campers attended in August
allowing a sharing of resources. In
1902 the New Jersey organization appears to have run its entire operation
at Wawayanda, using
ex-Dudley staff and campers. |
