In the summer of 1861, a few weeks after Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War, educator and abolitionist Frederick Gunn organized his own brigade of about 30 boys and 12 girls, students at a boarding school in Washington, Connecticut. An early advocate of outdoor education, Gunn had led students on camping trips before, but this time he had something a little more disciplined in mind.
Like the assembling Union troops, they marched precisely 42 miles to the shores of Long Island Sound, where they set up camp, waking in the morning to the sound of bugles, singing patriotic songs by a fire, and retiring under the stars. By day, between fishing and foraging, they conducted military training in preparation for enlistment in the Union Army. The gunnery camp, as it came to be known, was so successful (“10 delightful days,” one student recalled), that Gunn made it a tradition.
Summer camp in America has begun.
A lot has changed in the 150 years since Gunn trained future soldiers on a Connecticut beach, but summer camp has always involved “adults projecting their own ambivalent feelings about modern life onto children,” said Michael Smith, an Ithaca College professor who has studied the history of camping in the United States.
After the Civil War, as the country rapidly industrialized and many families moved from the countryside to noisy, crowded cities, those ambivalences turned to concern about the harmful effects of urbanization: Suddenly, instead of spending their days working on family farms, children found themselves lounging in cramped apartments or enduring long shifts in dark factories.
The summer camp tradition grew out of concern for the health and well-being of urban children, including those working in dangerous factories, like this boy photographed in 1911. National Archives/Public Domain
“There was a lot of anxiety about what it would do to the kids’ character,” Smith says, and the adults hoped that spending a few months in nature “would help the kids reclaim the physical and spiritual heritage of their hardworking pilgrim and pioneer ancestors.”
The first independent summer camp, not affiliated with a school, was founded in 1876 by Union veterans to train what they called “infirm boys.” The North Mountain School of Physical Culture, outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, cost $200 for four months and was based in part on founder Joseph Rothrock’s own outdoor childhood experiences. At age 12, Rothrock’s parents sent him to a relative’s farm after an illness had confined him to the house for years. Morning chores there and country walks with other children became a cure for his ailments.
At about the same time that Rothrock was taking city kids into the woods, Dartmouth dropout Ernst Balch watched with dismay as wealthy families spent summers with their boys at posh resorts in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Their dinners were served to them instead of catching their own food from the stream, and housekeepers made their beds instead of teaching them how to pitch a tent. Heartened by “the miserable conditions of the boys of the wealthy,” Balch founded Camp Chocorua in 1881. In addition to swimming and hiking, campers cooked their own meals, cleaned trails, and did their own laundry. “Balch believed that such activities would foster self-reliance, not dependency,” says Smith.
Soon, summer camps sprang up across New England, and they weren’t just for boys: Camp Alley in New York began accepting girls in 1892. In 1902, Laura Mattoon founded Camp Kehonka in New Hampshire, where girls were allowed to wear “two-legged clothes,” or skorts, and frolic freely. And in 1910, Luther Halsey Gulick and his wife, Charlotte, founded Camp Fire Girls, an offshoot of the Boy Scouts, and started Camp Wohelo in Maine, an acronym for Work, Health, Love.
Campfire Girls hiking in 1915 wearing early skorts. Some of the young women appear to be wearing feather headbands. Cultural appropriation of Native American costumes and other traditions is an issue summer camps still deal with. Public Domain
By the end of World War I, summer camps “evolved from a collection of loosely organized camps for children from very poor or well-off families to nationally recognized youth-helping institutions,” according to Smith. At the start of the 20th century, there were fewer than 100 summer camps. By 1918, the number had grown to more than 1,000.
In the years between the two world wars, as fears of the rise of fascism spread throughout the adult world, proponents began to see summer camps as a way to instill principles of democratic cooperation in the next generation. Noted naturalist and former artillery camper H.W. Gibson argued that camps should lead to “the development of better citizenship and character that will continue to be produced when campers return to their homes, schools, and communities.”
When World War II began, it was expected that campers would contribute to the war effort through volunteer work in victory gardens or on labor-shortaged farms. A June 1942 article in Camping Magazine suggested several new activities for campers, including “coordinating camp defense forces” and “drawing a leisure-time bucket list in the trenches of the Bataan Peninsula.” Meanwhile, the American Camping Association pledged to prioritize “the physical fitness of the youth for the fight,” Smith says.
But after the war, American summer camps morphed from mobile defense forces into the recreational version we know today, where kids practice building s’mores.
Boys practice various crafts at Camp Bear Hollow in Virginia in 1958. At the time, summer camps were focusing more on leisure than war preparation. © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
“Many psychologists and youth activists were concerned that growing up during World War II created a generation of troubled, anxious young people,” Smith says. In the ’50s and ’60s, when, as Smith puts it, “a significant number of kids experienced camp in some way,” parents increasingly wanted the experience to be a refuge for their children’s innocence, rather than a training ground for soldiers, citizens, or independent adults.
American summer camps have reflected other social and cultural trends. Camps for marginalized children began to appear during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, including Camp Atwater in Massachusetts, the first summer camp for black children. But for the next half century, summer camps in many parts of the country remained racially segregated.
Though a few radical labor unions ran integrated summer camps in the 1930s and ’40s (most famously, Camp Wauchka, short for Working Children’s Camp, where counselors led discussions about segregation), perhaps the first mainstream integrated camp was founded by the women of the Methodist Council of Little Rock. Camp Aldersgate opened in 1947 on land that was once a turkey farm. Those first few years were tumultuous: While kids swam in the lake and mingled in the dining hall, camp staff dealt with death threats, bomb threats, and the occasional gunshot.
While the children swam in the lake, camp staff dealt with threats and occasional gunfire.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act made racially segregated summer camps illegal, but true integration came slowly. (Summer camps today are still coming to terms with a long tradition of exclusion, such as the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay youth, as well as the cultural appropriation of Native American names and symbols.)
Camp advocates say a few weeks of camping could solve a myriad of social problems, but they don’t agree on what those problems are. Some argue that camp should fundamentally be a therapeutic experience, a place where kids “develop more complete individuals and are ultimately better able to contribute to civil society as adults,” Smith said.
These days, about 26 million kids attend some kind of camp each year, and the institution “evolves but endures,” Smith says. While the space may always reflect adult worries and anxieties, summer camp has a deeper meaning for kids: fun.
