The American Camping Movement

The Establishment of Formal Camps 

Brought about by the Progressive Movement (1890-1920),  belief at the time was that outdoor experiences were what ensured that boys would grow into strong balanced men. The possibility that the indoor experience would result in boys becoming “morally corrupt”,  led religious and community leaders of this period to push for the establishment of summer camps. [2]

The Organized Camping Movement was a distinctly American ideal, begun as an educational protest movement against certain features of an increasingly urbanized and industrial world. Child labor and crowded cites created movements to save children and raised the moral standards of a generation.  The Playground Movement, the Children’s Museum Movement, and the organized camping movement were three of these efforts that were designed to “improve the lives of children suffering from deplorable living conditions and to have them bond with nature and enhance their intellect.”[3]  By 1900 this movement, driven by “a powerful sympathy and understanding of the needs of boyhood” involved three kinds of summer camps: the natural science educational camps, the religious toned camps, and the private camps for well-to-do families.[4]

Squam Lake in New Hampshire became ground zero for this organized camping movement. 

The first organized, privately operated summer camps came into existence because of two groups of people, parents and educators, who saw the value in constructive outdoor activity during the summer months to counteract the influences of social change at the time. "Roughing it" would build character, and, as one early camp founder put it, save humanity from “dying of indoor-ness.”[5]

 And evidence shows that in the 25 years between World War I and World War II, the number of camps for the physically disabled rose as well,  from roughly half a dozen, to more than 50.

By 1940, the National Park Service had fully embraced the camping concept, publishing an article in their Regional Review called Organized Camping: Past and Present.

The regional Review article recognized the range of camps at the time, including those just for special needs like Greentop, stating:

There are camps for boys, girls, boys and girls, family camps, private camps, organization camps, and camps which specialize in a single, activity, such as music or dancing. There also are camps for the ill and physically handicapped, such as those for crippled, deaf, cardiac and diabetic children...These recognize and take advantage of the controlled situation and opportunities for social adjustment and simple living that are inherent in camp conditions.[6]

Franklin Roosevelt, who developed the earliest camps at Catoctin through his CCC, was not ignorant of the impact that these outdoor camp experiences offered children.

As far back as Roosevelt's freshman year in high school, camps would become a part of his life. In 1896 Roosevelt started as a freshman at the Groton School.  Three years earlier, in response to the growing interest in the American Camping Movement, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, founder and headmaster of the school, created an outreach program of the Groton School’s Missionary Society. Groton School Camp opened on the northwestern side of Squam Lake. 

Peabody’s influence on Roosevelt was vast, not only being his high school headmaster and camp director, but officiating at Roosevelt’s wedding to Eleanor and presiding over the service marking FDR’s first presidential term in office. So strong were Roosevelt’s feeling for Peabody that in the April 13, 1944 obituary for the reverend, Roosevelt wrote, “As long as I live his influence will mean more to me than that of any other people next to my father and mother.”[7]