The camp directory.

Why camps

I love camps. I went to one when I was six and seven, in 1981 and 1982, and it stayed with me the rest of my childhood. When I was twenty I happened to be in the area and drove in mid-summer to ask if they might have a job for me the next year. I worked at camps for more than fifteen years after that.

Some of the best people I have known in my life have been camp people.

A newspaper here in Minnesota runs an annual call for nominations, where people write in about the places and businesses and attractions that matter most in the state. I wrote an essay about why camps belonged on that list. It was not chosen.

This directory is a small part of the same argument.

Where this started

Organized camping in America is usually dated to 1861, when Frederick Gunn, a schoolmaster and abolitionist who ran a boarding school in Washington, Connecticut, took his students on a two-week trek to the Long Island Sound. They hiked roughly thirty miles, slept out, fished, and boated. Gunn kept doing it for years, moving the gatherings to Lake Waramaug, and ran them until 1879.

He was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and believed physical life outdoors was part of an education, not a break from it. Several boys who camped with him later founded camps of their own. The American Camp Association was founded in 1910, originally as the Camp Directors Association of America.

The Northwoods

What people who live here do not always realize is that these camps are a lot of people's first introduction to Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Families from all over the country and all over the world send their children to a lake up north. Those kids grow an attachment to a part of the country most Minnesotans think of as somewhere they go on a weekend. They come back as adults and they bring their own families. A good deal of the tourism up here started with a summer somebody spent at camp when they were twelve.

Minnesotans send their own children to camp less often than you would expect, and that is part of why this goes unnoticed here. We have cabins. We go up north and stay at a resort. We already have the lake.

Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan hold an unusual concentration of camps, and many of the children who attended them came from somewhere else. Camp Minocqua was founded on Lake Tomahawk in the early 1900s by a doctor who went north looking for a site before the ice was even off the lakes, and Chicago boys reached it by train. By the 1940s newspapers were describing special trains arriving with campers for the season. Camp Agawak opened at Minocqua in 1921. Towering Pines and Woodland have been running near Eagle River for more than seventy-five years. Chippewa Ranch Camp was established at Eagle River in 1946.

Concordia Language Villages, near Bemidji, is the clearest example of the reach. It started in 1961 when Gerhard Haukebo, on the faculty at Concordia College, ran an experimental two-week German immersion program with seventy-two children aged nine to twelve. French followed the next year, Norwegian and Spanish in 1963, Russian in 1966. The permanent villages were later built on Turtle River Lake, each one architecturally faithful to the culture it represents. It now draws roughly thirteen thousand participants a year from across the United States and abroad.

Camps that are gone

A lot of camps have closed. Their alumni are often 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 as much as the ones taking campers next June, and their alumni can still build an archive. The camp does not have to still exist for that to happen.