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Now and Then THE HISTORY OF CAMPS—A Truly American Experience
By Matt Stringer

Kids diving off rocks into lakes; children preparing and serving their own meals in chow halls; campers swimming out into depths unknown—doesn’t sound like the summer camps you know from the movies and your own experiences, but when camps first appeared in the late 1880s, that’s how they were.

“In the late 19th century, the photos will just make your skin crawl if you’re a parent today,” said Abigail Van Slyck, author of A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960 (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

By the 1930s things changed: the Red Cross safety-proofed camps across America, and, among other things, created fenced in areas in lakes where children who could not swim were stopped from treading to deeper water.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the book is Slyck herself who is a professor of art history and architecture at Connecticut College. But she doesn’t see the two as incongruous and said, “I am convinced we can read architecture as a body of evidence.”

Slyck picked summer camps, because, outside of a few camps that were run by political parties in Italy and France, the experience is uniquely American and that millions of Americans have attended them.

What she wanted to do was find a topic that was unique to children and then tell a story of a unique social experience through the lens of architecture.

“Summer camps seemed perfect,” she said.

From the time camps were created in the late 1880s to the modern version, one overriding them of summer camp has been returning to the wilderness. However, there is a major difference between the summer camps of old and the ones children hike off to today: when the first summer camps started to appear, children who attended them did all the dishes and it was meant to serve as a bridge to adulthood.

“You’d cook. You’d serve meals. You’d clean. The daily routine of camp was what camp was about,” Slyck said.

The first camps were established mainly for boys and were structured much like the army. But by the early 20th century camps appeared for girls. The girls’ camps tended to follow the same model as boys about serving as a bridge to adulthood but focused on preparing girls to be wives and mothers, Slyck said.

But things changed and the camp experience did, too, forever.

“Today, it’s much more about camp as a special time for kids. The 20th century has been called the century of the child,” Slyck said. “The summer camp is also about taking the child back to nature. There’s so much about American culture in the frontier,” Slyck said. “The beauty of camp is it’s a great opportunity to step away from family to experience something new. At camp, they [children] get to make new friends and try out different versions of themselves.”

Slyck herself is no stranger to the summer camp experience even though her parents were a bit surprised that she was researching the history of camps in America. “I went to a couple different camps. I didn’t like roughing it. My parents for one were very much stunned that I’ve written about it. I dedicated it to them,” she said.

Of the camps she did attend, her favorite was horseback riding camp. “I learned something new that was different from home,” she said.

The people who make that experience come to life for the children are the camp directors. During her research, Slyck went to over a dozen camps and interviewed camp directors all across the country, most of whom have a deep knowledge of childhood developmental psychology. Slyck said a lot of the camp directors share a universal view.

“They really want to help kids be self motivated. They really want to start a spark in the kids and encourage kids to do for themselves. They’re excited about being alive and most of them came into the job since they had such a great time at camp,” she said. 

Matt Stringer is the editor of Curious Parents.