By Abigail A.Van Slyck, Ph.D
Whenever I tell people that my research deals with the history of summer
camps, they smile. Undoubtedly some of the smiles are triggered by fond
camp memories: the smell of pine, perhaps, or the taste of s’mores.
But sometimes (I suspect) the smiles serve to hide a certain amount of
confusion about what summer camps have to do with architectural history.
If we are thinking of the most conventional definition of the field—a
history of innovative works designed by architects of genius—then
that confusion is warranted. This is not to say that architects have
never designed summer camps. They have—they do—often producing
buildings of some quality. But if we are primarily interested in documenting
cutting edge experiments in aesthetic theory, Camp Lakamaga—an
exemplary Girl Scout camp in eastern Minnesota—would not be our
first stop.
My interest in summer camps grows from a different vision of architectural
history, particularly a conviction that we can do more with the methods
of architectural history than simply trace the workings of genius. On
one hand, I believe that we can look seriously at a wider range of buildings,
including the mundane, run-of-the-mill buildings that scholars in my
field call vernacular architecture. On the other—and for me, this
is the more important point—we can also elicit more from all kinds
of buildings. Instead of interpreting buildings solely in light of the
architect’s interests and aptitudes, we can also glean from them
new insights into the cultural aspirations and institutional priorities
that caused them to be built in the first place.
Commonplace social institutions are of particular interest, their numbers
alone suggesting their importance to the many people who invested time
and effort in seeing them built. Ultimately, my goal is to see what buildings
and their larger settings—what we call the cultural landscape—can
tell us about human society that we might not grasp as fully if we limited
ourselves to the written record.
Camps fit well within this framework. They are commonplace institutions
that sprouted up in growing numbers since camps were first established
in the 1880s. The American Camp Association (ACA) currently accredits
more than 2,400 camps and at least 1,700 of which are residential camps—the
focus of my study—although ACA also estimates that only about 25
percent of camps seek accreditation. As a result, millions of children
have some summer camp experience. Among social institutions, only public
schools have touched the lives of more youth.
For the past ten years, I have been studying the cultural landscape
of American summer camps, and have recently completed a book titled,
A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth,
1890-1960, published in October 2006 by the University of Minnesota Press.
The camps I have studied are a heterogeneous lot, including private camps,
camps with religious affiliations, camps organized by social service
agencies, and camps sponsored by youth organizations. In addition to
archival and library research into camp records and brochures, construction
documents, period photographs, and the prescriptive literature on camp
planning, I have studied firsthand camps in three major camping regions:
the Northeast and the neighboring sections of Canada (where many of the
earliest camps were located); the Southeast and especially the Blue Ridge
Mountains (whose high altitudes offered cooler summertime temperatures);
and the upper Midwest, with particular emphasis on Minnesota (where many
of the state’s fabled ten thousand lakes provided waterfront facilities
for summer camps).
Yet the study does not pretend to offer an exhaustive coverage of all
camps. For one thing, I have deliberately excluded family camps and well-baby
camps, which also served adult campers, thus requiring very different
living arrangements. Nor does it consider special needs camps or skill-based
camps that flourished after 1960. Yet, even within these restrictions,
the sheer number of residential camps in North America makes a comprehensive
history impossible.
While it would have been possible to impose geographical limitations
on the topic or to restrict my focus to the camp activities of a single
youth organization (like the YMCA or the Girl Scouts), my research convinced
me that such approaches would diminish the effectiveness of this study.
From my first forays into the archives of the YMCA, it became clear that
the organizational boundaries between youth organizations were extremely
permeable, as camp advocates associated with one group readily shared
their expertise to another. (Edgar G. Robinson, for instance, served
as the YMCA’s first International Secretary of Boys’ Work
between 1901 and 1922, while simultaneously fulfilling the role of executive
secretary of the fledgling Boy Scouts for some months in 1910. Likewise,
Luther Halsey Gulick, first secretary for physical work for the International
Committee of the YMCA, also established Camp Wohelo in Maine, a private
camp for girls, where he and his wife, Charlotte Vetter Gulick, worked
out the program for another new youth organization, Camp Fire Girls.)
Equally important, discussions of camp planning between organizations
and across regional boundaries took place for decades, and especially
after the reorganization of ACA in 1935. In short, theorizing about the
camp landscape and its impact on camp program was widespread; a study
that looked at a discrete subset of camps ran the risk of overstating
their singularity.
Instead of attempting to construct a chronological narrative that would
inevitably be incomplete, the book investigates major trends in camp-planning
practices between 1890 and 1960 in light of their impact on the construction
of childhood. Six chapters dissect the camp landscape into its major
functional components, the better to identify the range of factors that
affected each one.
The first chapter considers the metaphors that helped shape the camp
landscape as a whole. Established in response to turn-of-the-century
concerns about the emasculating impact of the feminized home, early boys’ camps
often evoked army life, housing campers in tents pitched around a square
parade ground that served as the setting for reveille, calisthenics,
inspection, taps, and other military rituals. Although the Great War
had initially heightened enthusiasm for such military trappings at camp,
its carnage eventually prompted many camp organizers to look to the past
for motifs that would enhance the romantic appeal of camp without also
evoking the painful realities of international strife. Particularly popular
were forms associated with the settling of the American frontier—Native
American tipis and council rings, as well as pioneer stockades and other
log buildings.
In contrast, by the 1940s, child development philosophies emphasized
an extended period of childhood and helped redirect the focus of camp
directors on cocooning children in a bucolic, strife-free, version of
nature. Camp planners (who were just beginning to emerge as a distinct
profession) provided dramatically new forms for the camp landscape. Using
curving paths and lush plantings that blend into the natural surroundings,
they adopted the same picturesque design principles that their professional
colleagues in city planning had begun to advocate for child-centered
suburbs. Natural-looking paths allowed children to roam the grounds on
foot, unaware of the amount of planning expertise that guided their steps.
At the same time, summer camps offered a unique perspective from which
to consider the transformation of the rural landscape in the twentieth
century. At one level, camps seem to have played a passive role, occupying
land deemed unnecessary to the capitalist economy, either because it
was too distant from urban centers for residential development, because
it was no longer cost-effective to farm, or because it had been cleared
of lumber. Yet, camps could also serve as catalysts for landscape change;
by attracting vacationing parents to near-by resorts, they fueled lakeside
development. Even more important to twentieth-century attitudes about
the wilder parts of nature, camps have served as manufactured versions
of a wilderness experience that parents buy for their children, even
as their own patterns of land-use (particularly urbanization and suburbanization)
eradicated the real thing.
Whatever the setting, the camp experience centered on a range of recreational
activities—what today we collectively call the camp program. At
the very earliest camps, most program activities were carried out in
natural settings where human intervention was minimal: a tramp in the
woods, a dip in the lake, a campfire on the shore. Soon enough, however,
camps began adding more and more activities to fill the day and providing
specially designed program areas in which to carry them out. Whether
at the waterfront, in nature and crafts cabins, around the campfire circle,
or on the playing fields, there has been a growing tendency to control
play in order to remove its physical danger, what education scholar Brian
Sutton-Smith has called “the domestication of play.”
In fact, the summer camp is an ideal site to consider the complexity
of this phenomenon, given that camps themselves were established to counteract
the domestication of play that had started in middle-class Victorian
homes. Yet, camps have not been immune from this more general cultural
trend to protect children from the dangers of play. Both the professionalization
of camp directing and the parallel development of camp accreditation
standards have pushed camp organizers to arrange the physical environment
in ways that will all but guarantee campers’ safety. Considered
in this light, the continued appropriation of Native American motifs
may be a means of lending an exotic flavor to games that have become
remarkably tame.
Sites associated with cooking and eating were equally important to any
well-run camp. Not only were wholesome meals essential for building up
the physical strength of campers, but mealtime rituals were also important
mechanisms for camp socialization, whether teaching the essentials of
gentility through good table manners or reinforcing camp loyalty through
the singing of camp songs. Meals were also moments when camp directors
reinforced their ideas of appropriate gender roles for male and female
campers.
Early twentieth-century camps often served meals in mess halls, which
adopted both the military’s nomenclature and its use of long tables
to pre-sort diners into chow lines. Despite its masculine associations,
the mess hall was popular at early girls’ camps, which were eager
to demonstrate that camping could help create a new kind of self-reliant
girl who was as disciplined, patriotic, and as useful as her brother—albeit
in her own way. Thus, while campers of both sexes were deeply involved
in food preparation in the early twentieth century, girls’ camps
often positioned themselves as training grounds for future domesticity
and often rejected practices (like the dishwashing line) favored at boys’ camps.
By mid-century, the mess hall gave way to the dining lodge, a new building
type that was less highly charged in terms of gender. There, campers
ate family-style at round tables in a dining room that was insulated
from kitchen activities. While campers of both sexes had some alimentary
chores, they were increasingly isolated from the adult world of labor.
Within this camp landscape, the sites associated with sleeping were
considered particularly important in maintaining campers’ good
health. Although tents had been widely used to enhance the military flavor
of early camps, they fell out of favor in the 1920s when camp directors
bolstered their own drive for professional status by consulting the new
field of public health for a scientific assessment of this common sleeping
accommodation. Alternatives abounded for the next twenty years, as did
theories on disease prevention. For those who saw sufficient ventilation
as the key to camper health, the answer was the large, tent-cabin with
canvas walls. For others, the issue was the spacing between beds, which
could be accommodated in the smaller “wooden tents,” built
throughout the 1930s under the auspices of the New Deal. Even by this
time some camp professionals were becoming increasingly interested in
the role camp could play in enhancing campers’ psychological well
being. For them, the answer lay in elaborate cabins that included both
sleeping and socializing areas, allowing counselors a space in which
to assess campers’ emotional
health. Featured in the camp planning manuals published by the YMCA,
Camp Fire Girls, and Girl Scouts in the late 1940s, such cabins became
common features of the camp landscape in the postwar camp-building boom.
The issue of camp sanitation provides an opportunity to delve deeper
into the gendered practices of summer camp. Thanks to the germ theory
of disease, the need for good camp sanitation was a scientific fact,
but the methods for achieving camp cleanliness were highly gendered.
At boys’ camps, organizers disdained too great a fastidiousness
as a sign of insufficient manliness. In contrast, girls’ camps
highlighted housekeeping activities as a major component of camp program,
specifying the various steps of each task in such detail that cleaning
took on a ritual character extending beyond its requirements for maintaining
good health.
By mid-century, ideas about camp cleanliness shifted from the camp environment
to campers’ bodies, but they remained highly gendered; boys’ camps
emphasized gang sinks, while showers became the norm at girls’ camps,
encouraging female campers to wash their entire bodies. To the extent
that girls’ camps favored individual showers, they also encouraged
female modesty—this despite the fact that the age of campers had
dropped steadily throughout the century. Thus, twentieth-century girls
carried a double-burden at American summer camps. They may have been
encouraged to take on new, more self-sufficient roles at camp, but they
were simultaneously expected to maintain high standards of cleanliness—both
for their surroundings and for themselves.
Particularly noteworthy is the introduction of Native American motifs
into the camp landscape, especially the Native American council rings
that became a widespread feature of camp life in the interwar period.
Popularized by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton as the material expression
of the orderliness and community orientation of Native American life,
the council ring fostered a new appreciation for Native American culture,
even as it supported the idea of Indians as a dying race, denying contemporary
realities of Native American life and reinforcing white dominance. At
the same time, its rituals allowed children from different European ethnicities
to assume—at least temporarily—a common racial identity;
once campers removed their feather headdresses and war paint, their shared
whiteness may have also seemed more evident.
The architecture of summer camps is more complex than we might first
imagine. Rudimentary though their forms may be, camp buildings were carefully
arranged to enhance the camp’s larger goal, whether fostering physical
health, social development, or spiritual well-being of campers. As a
result, the buildings themselves highlight attitudes about children and
their needs that are only hinted at in written record. Considered in
a certain light, there is a great deal to learn from Lakamaga.
Originally published in the 2007 January/February
issue of Camping Magazine. |
