The camp directory.

Why camps

Camp is where a lot of us first found out who we are with our family somewhere else. It is one of the last places a child is handed something genuinely hard and allowed to be bad at it, in front of everyone, for as long as it takes to stop being bad at it. Nobody steps in to smooth it over. That is the whole point of it.

The friendships hold. People who shared a cabin at eleven are still calling each other at fifty. So do the people who run the places. Some of the best people alive are camp people, and most of them have never been paid what the work is worth.

I went to camp when I was six and seven years old, in 1981 and 1982. It stayed with me through my whole childhood. When I was twenty and happened to be in the area, I drove in mid-summer and asked whether they might have a position the following year. I ended up working at camps for more than fifteen years.

Where this started

Organized camping in America is usually dated to 1861. A schoolmaster named Frederick Gunn, who ran a boarding school in Washington, Connecticut, walked his students about thirty miles to the Long Island Sound and kept them out there for two weeks. They slept outside, fished, and took to boats. He liked it enough to keep doing it, moved the gatherings to Lake Waramaug, and ran them until 1879.

Gunn was an abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and he thought hard physical life outdoors was a part of an education rather than a holiday from one. Several of the boys who went out with him started camps of their own later. The American Camp Association followed in 1910, under the name the Camp Directors Association of America.

The Northwoods

Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan hold a strange density of camps, and most of the children who filled them came from somewhere else entirely. Camp Minocqua was set up on Lake Tomahawk in the early 1900s by a doctor who went north scouting a site before the ice was even off the lakes, and Chicago boys got there by rail. By the 1940s the papers were reporting special trains pulling in with a season worth of campers. Camp Agawak opened at Minocqua in 1921. Towering Pines and Woodland have been running near Eagle River for over seventy five years. Chippewa Ranch Camp was established at Eagle River in 1946.

Here is the part worth saying plainly. For an enormous number of people scattered across the country and the world, a lake in northern Wisconsin or Minnesota is their first and strongest attachment to this part of America. They come back as adults. They bring their own children. Camps are a tourism engine for the upper Midwest that the people who live here barely register, partly because Minnesotans tend to have a cabin or a resort of their own and so send their kids to camp less often than families who live a long way off.

Concordia Language Villages, near Bemidji, shows the reach better than anything. It started in 1961 when Gerhard Haukebo, on the faculty at Concordia College, tried a two week German immersion program with seventy two children between nine and twelve. French came the next year, Norwegian and Spanish in 1963, Russian in 1966. The permanent villages went up later on Turtle River Lake, each one built to look like the culture it teaches. Roughly thirteen thousand people a year now pass through, from across the United States and from abroad.

Camps that are gone

A lot of camps have closed. Their alumni are frequently still in close touch with each other and still attached to ground that no longer operates as a camp. Those places belong in this list exactly as much as the ones taking campers next June, and their alumni can build an archive all the same. An alumni association does not require the camp to still exist.