The rise of the American summer camp was around the turn of the 20th century. The last few decades of the 1800s shaped the scene; child labor laws, more structured education (summer free of school), and the continued rise of the upper- and middle- classes. Along with a Western-world desire to "return" to nature and the idle summer season, camps surged in popularity.
In Van Slyck's A Manufactured Wilderness, Camp director Henry W. Gibson is quoted as saying it was "a period of moral deterioration with most boys … who have heretofore wasted the glorious summer time loafing on the city streets, or as disastrously at summer hotels or amusements places."
In addition to recreational overnight camps, organizations like the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, Camp Fire, and various religiously affiliated camps hosted summer camps. During the 1990s the stereotypical month long "resort" style summer camp began to lose ground to more specialized and shorter camps. As far as that kind of summer camp goes the heyday is in the past and was sometime during the middle of the 20th c., but for summer camps in general, today there are more camps than ever before with record setting attendees.
Today a camp for almost any activity can be easily found; sports, academics, lifestyle, special needs, fine arts, or hobbies. The ACA cites the last decade as one of the most successful for summer camps.
I can talk about the origins.
The constantly growing interest in fresh air for the people would indicate either the great importance of the subject, or the existence of a "fad."
-Helene Ingram, Superintendent of Relief, New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 1907
The rise of summer camps at the end of the 19th century into the early 20th comes out of concerns over industrialization and urbanization, particularly on America's East Coast: on one hand, the poorer health conditions in cities; on the other, the crisis in masculinity (because masculinity is always in crisis) resulting from the loss of wilderness skills and hardy frontier/outdoorsy physical labor among boys. At first, around 1850, concerns especially over the changes wrought by city life resulted in a popular idea of "vacationing." The summer camp experience, specifically, represents a unique focus on the needs of children, reflecting the later 19th century's growing emphasis on childhood as a special period of life.
One root of the summer camp tradition lies in the 1860s and 70s. Paradigmatic of this trend is Sea Rest, the first YWCA camp. It was organized first in 1874 to provide a brief summer respite for working-class "young ladies" from their factory jobs in cities. (Yes, this predates the first YMCA camp by a decade). Around the turn of the century, progressive reformers like Ingram would decry the miserable conditions in cities and extol the relative Eden of the unspoiled West for restoring health to working class white children. And indeed, low-cost summer camps targeting this population sparked up in the decades before and after World War I. Church and synagogue groups were particularly active in pushing the benefits of "fresh air"
The second branch of the summer camp tradition was planted by leaders who did not, at least publicly, see a summer outdoors as a haven from work--they saw the need and the chance to recreate the American frontier, teaching practical/wilderness skills to counteract what they saw as "softening" or feminizing effects of middle/upper-class city life. So ramping up in the 1880s and 1890s were targeted camping experiences, very much in the classic summer camp idea.
In the first decade of the 20th century, camps start popping up with increasing frequency--including for girls. Although obviously so-called "muscular Christianity" wasn't a factor for them, it turns out parents really really liked not having to take care of their kids during part of the summer (no, really). Additionally, education reformers saw the development of wilderness skills as particularly valuable for girls not necessarily in the physical sense, but in the character-building or moral sense. And, of course--kids really, really liked it. As we'll see later, girls liked it enough to insert themselves where they were not, in fact, wanted.
Although these camps were generally segregated by religion, usually gender, and socio-economic class, and certainly it was easier to maintain a standing camp (as opposed to a one-time "camping experience") if your campers had more money to pay, there were indeed options for a range of people. Leslie Paris, Children's Nature, observes that the segregated access very rarely extended to black children.
By World War I, the camp experience had obtained a place in the American cultural consciousness, above all through children's literature. My understanding is that summer camps subsequently exploded in popularity between WWI and WWII, but that's the limits of my knowledge, sorry.
Scouting (Boy Scouts and Girl Guides/Girl Scouts) as an international movement is born out of the same impulses in 1907-1910, but intriguingly there is not a direct connection in origin, only in popularity.
British officer Robert Baden-Powell developed an interest in wilderness/scouting techniques in the late 19th century, fitting right in with our pattern, but it wasn't until fighting alongside an American-born officer in Zimbabwe, 1896, that he really developed the idea of a need for children to learn outdoors skills (as well as, it seems, actually learning the skills for himself, hehe). But his inspiration and teacher, Frederick Burnham, had gained his own knowledge organically, growing up on a Lakota Sioux reservation and then working on ranches in the American West. After returning to Europe, Baden-Powell tested out his ideas in a few books and in a summer camp he organized for boys. It was enormously popular. Girl Scouts (Girl Guides) essentially invented themselves: Baden-Powell was taken aback to discover that enthusiastic girls had registered as Boy Scouts by using their initials instead of their full first names, and had his sister Agnes create and lead the Girl Guide organization. (Agnes was no slouch: she had founded her own Boy Scout troop in 1908.) And the girls' enthusiasm won over Baden-Powell: he wrote the first major handbook Girl Guiding in 1918.
We've had plenty of people question the heyday and fall theme of the question, but can we still get a conversation about camps here? How about answering "How did Summer Camps begin and grow in popularlity?"
Thank you all for the insightful responses. To clear up my initial intent, when referring to "fall", I am speaking about the falling number of 4-6 week overnight camps in favor of day camps and 1-2 week overnight camps.
I can speak a little bit about one subset of American summer camps, Jewish summer camps, of which there are hundreds across the U.S. One good book if you're interested in Jewish camps is A Place of Our Own: The Rise of Reform Jewish Camping.
/u/sunagainstgold already talked about the motivations for social reformers who wanted to take poor white children out of crowded tenements in East Coast cities out to the countryside. Jewish reformers were motivated similarly, as a huge wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants started arriving after 1880 due to state sanctioned pogroms in the Russian Empire and rising anti-Semitism in Europe generally. Jewish camp founders wanted to both Americanize new immigrants, while preventing full assimilation. The first Jewish summer camp was founded for girls in 1893 in New York, Camp Lehman (it still exists today as Camp Isabella Freedman). The earliest Jewish camps were Jewish in demographics but not necessarily in programming. They hosted activities similar to Christian or secular camps (such as outdoor activities) and often appropriated Native American practices and names.
But some Jewish leaders were concerned about maintaining "distinctly Jewish identities" in the American melting pot and saw the potential of Jewish camps as a place of education and community building. Historically, Jewish communities were organized around a synagogue, but in 1916 the Central Jewish Institute opened as an independent Jewish community center hosting both youth and adult programming in New York City. They opened a summer camp in 1919. Jewish Socialist groups like Der Arbiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) founded their own camps to teach socialism, progressivism, and Yiddish (as the new generation was only learning English at school); Camp Kinder Land opened in 1923 in New York.
Finally, the rise of Zionism and continued Jewish immigration to the U.S. from Europe (where Jewish and Jewish Zionist youth movements were more popular) led to the creation of specifically Zionist ideological Jewish camps. Hashomer Hatzair, the first and largest Marxist-Zionist youth scouting movement, opened a branch in North America in 1923 (founded by Polish Jews). Summer camps soon followed. Poale Zion, one of the bigger Labor Zionist parties, created a branch of Habonim Dror, their youth movement, in 1935. They opened multiple camps hosting thousands of campers (eleven total, some still operate today). Why were so many camps Labor Zionist? The movement’s ideology emphasized Jews connecting to and working the land (the land of mandatory Palestine, but the same values were transposed onto wherever the camp was located). While during World War II and after labor Zionists focused on getting Jews out of Europe on and onto kibbutzim, immigration to mandatory Palestine was encouraged internationally and after its founding many camps took their high school age campers to Israel for a summer in leiu of a “regular” camp summer. I don't have as many good sources on the labor Zionist camp movement in particular, but J.J. Goldberg did write a book about Habonim Dror (I haven't read it but J.J. Goldberg is good in general): Builders and Dreamers: Habonim Labor Zionist Youth in North America
Well, since we aren't seeing much, I did a little digging and found out that Paradise Farm Camps claims to have started the idea back in 1875 with a farm-owning, city living woman.
"Previous to the summer of 1875, nobody had heard of a week in the country for a city child. In that year, young Mrs. Eliza Sproat Turner, founder of the New Century Club for women, who had a gift for making people hear of the unheard, and who owned a farm in Chadd’s Ford, persuaded “12 startled parents of 12 little girls that it would benefit the children to spend a fortnight on her farm as her guests.” Mrs. Turner and her friend, Mrs. Fannie Weitzel, collected the wondering children and were the escorts of the first Paradise Special." - http://www.paradisefarmcamps.org/?page_id=641
Based on this website that seems to sell registration solutions, they seem to think the YMCA followed suit shortly thereafter with Frost Valley, formerly known as Camp Wayawanda: http://regpointsolutions.com/10-oldest-camps-in-america/
From the camp itself: http://frostvalley.org/about-us/our-history/
We can also take a look at Camp Dudley, a YMCA camp founded in 1885. https://campdudley.org/about/tradition-and-mission/
The wikipedia entry for Camp Dudley claims to have been called Camp Wayawanda in it's early years, however it is not sourced so I am not sure.
So, let's see why it might have become so popular. Check out the wikipedia entry on Camping. It seems as though it actually began as a Victorian pasttime, right around the same time that our Ms. Turner from Paradise Farm began her retreat. If you think about it, going to a farmhouse is a much more predictable and comfortable version of camping. It provides a safer environment for young kids, and allows them to learn the facets of camping without diving in head first.
From the Paradise Farms Camp website above, we see another excerpt:
A quote from the 1927 minutes: “The greatest marvel and entertainment and novelty of all was the country itself – on which so many children had never laid eyes before. Many had never ridden on a train, some had never crossed Market Street. This big thing, this marvel was uppermost to these seemingly sophisticated children of 1926 who talked glibly of radio and movies, who danced the Charleston in the streets of the city to the tune of a gramaphone[sic] instead of a hand organ.”
I don't know about you, but I think that this still resonates. It's the idea behind: "Turn off the TV and go outside."
I couldn't find anything to support the claim of the fall of camps. In fact, I found some evidence to the contrary:
- Since 2002, the number of ACA day camps has increased by 69% and resident camps have increased by 21%. (CRM Camp Statistics Report, June 2013)
Most of the actual stats are behind a paywall.
TL;DR Camps grew up alongside Camping during the Victorian Era beginning in the late 1870s. Camps are growing in attendance.
Vaguely related, but I remember meeting a man who told me a bunch of stories about working at a state run summer camp in the Soviet Union, and he implied that such programs were widspread and widely available, does anyone know how true this was, relative to American summer camps, and how these programs originated ?
Dear readers,
many people have questioned the assumed 'fall' of the summer camps. That's totally fine. Perhaps OP was mistaken, or perhaps they're right. Anyone who knows is invited to post a comprehensive and in-depth reply covering the (or a) history of American summer camps.
Any reply which does not meet our standards will be removed. So please don't just post that the 'fall' did not happen or, even worse, that you attended/worked at/drove by a summer camp just last summer. Thanks!
Just watched the strange truth on natgeotv
They speak of the bundt summer camps ran by American Arm of the nazi and fritz kundt I think I have the spelling right I'm sure a quick Google search might clarify it
They encouraged kids to have sexual relations