20th century AD

Camping Magazine, July-August, 2003 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 hot 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, Summer 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 Adirondack, 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 Movement in 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 Architecture of 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, homelike 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.