The history of summer camps in the US
The Gunnery Camp, 1861. Public Domain
Sending kids away for weeks at a time each summer to commune with nature is as American as patriotism, capitalism, and anxiety. So, unsurprisingly, the history of summer camp twines around all three. Eight score and five years ago…In the summer of 1861, just after the Civil War began, the educator Frederick Gunn unofficially brought forth the first summer camp in conjunction with his boarding school in Connecticut. He made around 40 kids hike 42 miles to the Long Island Sound, where they woke up to a bugle call, caught their own fish, and performed military drills. The first independent summer camp came along five years later, when the North Mountain School of Physical Culture charged the parents of “weakly boys” $200 to spend four months in the woods of Northeastern Pennsylvania to toughen them up. By the end of World War I, summer camps were well established throughout the US, with options for very poor children to gain the benefits of nature and for very rich children to be whipped into shape outside of their summer hotels. Postwar changed everythingAfter World War II, parents increasingly worried that their children had been toughened enough by life—food rations, air raid drills, family members dying in service—and that summer camp could become a place for them to chill out instead. This is how we got to the handicrafts-and-s’mores era. Specialized camps centered around a particular interest for shorter amounts of time emerged in the last decades of the 20th century:
What has changed: It’s hard to find long-term residential summer camps for kids these days, as the market shifts to accommodate the hectic schedules of modern kids and their parents. |