Pioneer

Next, is Camp Pioneer. This camp wasn’t exclusively located on the site of Pioneer Hill, the hill was just named after the camp. Camp Pioneer’s exact opening date is difficult to pin down, mostly due to the ambiguous naming of camps at the time. You see, in the 1920s, as the first generation of scouts began to grow older, the camps realized they needed a more advanced program to appeal to these scouts. This would often come in the form of a “Backwoods” Camp, or an “Advanced Camp”, and also a “Pioneer Camp”. Oftentimes, they would be connected or closeby to other camps. As Paul Meyer’s book again states, “These special interest camps featured the patrol method of cooking and the programs varied by the theme of the camp. Pioneers lived in Adirondack shacks, Foresters in the tree houses, “Indians” in teepees and Waterfront men in the beach tents.”. Oftentimes, these camps would occur on lake Big Blue, including the western bay of Lake Big Blue (now called Turtle Bay). To add further confusion, those who actually built the infrastructure of the camps were often called “Pioneers”, though these would often be fully grown adults who weren’t really scouters. This section will focus on the history of “Camp Pioneer”, which was a named subcamp similar to the rest of the subcamps. 

The first dedicated camp to such a program was opened in 1925 on the south end of Lake Big Blue, a year before any other scout camps opened on that lake. The July 30th, 1925 edition of the Whitehall Forum tells of “the new Pioneer Camp located on Big Blue Lake. Pioneer Camp is in the stage of development and is the forerunner to several more such camps to be established at the Big Blue site”. Rather confusingly though, another newspaper from earlier that month claims that both Pioneer and Blackhawk were opened in 1925, and they combined to make Blackhawk in 1926. I’m not sure what is causing this discrepancy, as nearly every other source, including later newspapers, list Blackhawk’s opening date as 1926. If I had to guess, what probably happened is scouts from different districs used Camp Pioneer, and when the west side scouts opened up Camp Blackhawk the following year, they retroactively called it Camp Blackhawk. But again, I’m not sure. In any case, the camp called “Camp Pioneer" seems to have moved to a site east of Hiawatha Beach in 1926, as Paul Meyer’s book mentions Camp Pioneer being active in that area in the 1920s. It’s years of operation aren’t clear, but it seems that it operated sporadically until 1937 when the Old Blackhawk site was renamed “Camp Pioneer”, and appeared to be a full service camp with Naturalist, Handicraft, Aquatics, and Hikemaster until 1948. When the Camp’s name was changed back to Camp Blackhawk in 1949, Camp Pioneer was moved yet again to its previous location east of Hiawatha Beach, and shortly after that near the 248 club hotel, before the land was sold and Pioneer ceased to be.