The Summer Camps of Squam
Why a Summer Camp for Kids?
Just a few or more generations ago, much of America was an agricultural society with many people living on small farms, and so the school calendar became fixed so that the need for children to assist in the farm work established a calendar for children that dictated nine months of schoolwork and three months of vacation time for farm work. Not only were boys required for farm labor, but girls also assisted in various farm operations that ranged from dairy production to making household craft products.
But by the beginning of the twentieth century, rural society was changing so that child labor was less and less needed and the traditional school calendar for a formal education changed to reflect that. The three months of summer vacation remained but was now increasingly void of organized activities for both boys and girls. However, thanks to Ernest Balch who started the children’s summer-camp movement at Squam Lake, summers for kids became much better.
The very first boys camp in America, Camp Chocorua, began in 1881 and was located on what is now called Church Island. The Groton School Camp soon followed in 1883 (changing its name to Camp Algonquin in 1886 and then Camp Asquam in1887). The first summer camp exclusively for girls, Pinelands Camp for Girls, was started in 1902 on Dog Cove by Mercedes Munoz.
The sudden availability and popularity of activities exclusively for children caused Camp Chocorua’s enrollment to rapidly increase from eighteen boys in 1886 to twenty-eight just one year later and spurred on the development of many other summer camps.
Camp Harvard, renamed Camp Asquam, occupied a site directly across from Chocorua and provided more amenities. Its campers had cots instead of sleeping on the ground, and a cook prepared all of their meals allowing the boys more free time to enjoy recreation and adventure.
The Summer Camping Life
Camping is a primitive instinct to all humans. Our ancestors were perpetual campers when the norm was living in the open and in close contact with nature. They were dependent on the raw natural resources available for practically all necessities. But with the increasing complications of growing a civilization, many values of this early life were lost along with any attractions of camping. It was not until the late 1860s and 70s that the irresistible appeal of the woods, lakes, and mountains instinctively became desirable. Nature lovers again desired to get into the woods and experience natural beauty for pleasure and recreation as well as camping.
The birth of America’s summer camps for boys and girls was largely a consequence of the nineteenth-century tourist industry in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Starting in the 1820s, wealthy elites sought to escape the city summer heat of Boston and New York, and they discovered the relative coolness and beauty of the White Mountains.
Also drawn to the mountains for the fresh food, clean air, and proximity to lakes, the influx of seasonal residents and tourists helped shore up the economy providing the locals with customers for their accommodations and burgeoning hotel business. And they did indeed provide a restorative escape from the hard work of city life for themselves and their families, including serving a specific subset of that tourist population – their children. The very first summer camps for boys, then girls, in the United States started on Squam Lake.
Ernest Balch, (wearing dark jacket in the middle of staff and others) was the founder of summer camps in America.
The camp song lyrics reflected Balch’s values of honesty and duty.
The Summer Camps of Squam
It is interesting to note that many of the summer camp founders shared their philosophies on what campers should learn during their summer experience. Most were either involved in education or religion as school founders, teachers, ministers or doctors, although Ernest Balch, the founder of Camp Chocorua, was a Dartmouth sophomore dropout! Balch’s ideas on what a summer camp should teach were simply basic. There would be no servants in the camp so that all camp work would be done by the boys and faculty. Another goal was that the boys must be trained to master the lake. It was a matter of pride that campers could navigate the lake at any time of the day or night, fair weather or bad. They were also taught swimming, diving, boat work, canoeing, and sailing. The system worked well. No Chocorua boy ever got into serious trouble in or on the water.
After a well-known educator, Dr. Hanford Henderson, visited Ernest Balch at Camp Chocorua, he wrote and published an article extolling the virtues of the values being taught. The Rev. W.E. Nichols read that article and got in touch with Balch. As a result, in 1882 he started Camp Harvard in Stow, Massachusetts, promoting the same philosophies. Soon after opening, the summer camp was sold to Dr. Winthrop Talbot who moved it to Asquam (Squam) Lake renaming it Camp Asquam, but he abandoned Balch’s principals with the intention of making it a camp for profit. Then in 1903 one of Dr. Talbot’s assistants, Dr. Shubmell, started his own summer camp on Little Squam Lake and called it Camp Sherwood Forrest. In 1914 he sold the camp to Dr. John May who at the time was acknowledged “Best Canoeist” in the Country.” May changed the camp to a girls’ camp specializing in canoeing. Then in 1920, while raising four sons, he started Camp Wawbewawa next door as a canoeing camp for boys.
A stepped diving platform at Camp Asquam was one of many sporting activities integrated with woodland activities, social welfare work, and tutoring.
Student campers at the Harvard Engineering Camp learned the various aspects of surveying and related disciplines.
Camp Asquam for girls featured basketmaking and other crafts as part of the curriculum.
Edwin DeMerritte who ran the DeMerritte School in Boston had been influenced by his experience at both Camp Asquam and Camp Sherwood Forrest and founded Camp Algonquin.
Groton School Camp was started by the missionary arm of Groton School. It’s mission, and that of the school’s founder, Reverend Endicott Peabody, was to benefit inner city and “at risk” boys by giving them an opportunity to develop a sense of “well-being,” learning social skills, and an awareness of personal potential. This was accomplished by using students from the prestigious Groton School as councilors, ultimately benefiting both.
Camp Hale, started in 1900, had a similar philosophy. The summer camp was founded by the Rev. Ernest E. Hale as an extension of The Hale House located in South Boston.
At this point the intertwining of summer camp founders got even more complex. Dr. Oliver Huntington of Newport, Rhode Island, had an interest in starting a school following the German educational format and was encouraged by Rev. Endicott Peabody (at the Groton School) to start the Cloyne School of Newport, Rhode Island, as a “feeder school” for Groton. Dr. Huntington was married to Ernest Balch’s sister Mary Ellen, so it is easy to understand why Camp Cloyne was founded on Squam Lake.
Dr. Dudley Sargent, director of Harvard’s Hemenway Gymnasium, was the nation’s leading voice in physical education at the turn of the century. Having founded the all-women Sargent School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the intent to prepare women to be physical educators, he used nutrition and physical activity as tools to better the health of America’s youth. The popular “Sargent Method” involved careful measurements of each student’s physique and athletic ability, assigned personalized training routines, and charted their progress. His approach was implemented in many summer camps including Camp Asquam for Girls headed by Sargent College alumna, and the curriculum was proudly credited to the Sargent Method and Dudley Sargent himself was listed as a reference.
Woodcraft by Nessmuk
This book by author George W. Sears is described in an announcement as "a book for the guidance of those who go for pleasure to the woods," and was one of the first authoritative books on camping as a recreation. In the 1870s and 80s, books for boys like the "Knockabout Series" described the joys and adventures of such a wild life that were written to stimulate the imagination of children. The organized summer camp as an educational tool was a natural outcome of this renaissance of the primitive.
The rapid development of the Summer Camp movement for boys and girls was concurrent with this "back to the country" movement at the end of the nineteenth century. People became fascinated with learning about the skills needed to adapt to more primitive conditions on farms and the Western frontier. The times also spawned other institutions that focused on nature like the Country Day School, the Boy Scouts, and the Camp Fire Girls.
Reflections of Squam
Camp Chocorua’s Influence Larry and Nat Coolidge
The Minister and the Harvard Engineering Camp
Peter Van Winkle
THE CAMP MOVEMENT
Camp Chocorua
Ernest Balch Bob Twombly
A Religious Tradition and the Lure of Camp
Edie Eddy
Love of Camp Chocorua Laury Coolidge
Simple Living, Conservation and the Environment
Prudie Van Winkle
A Family Institution and the Christmas Card
Arthur Howe
Even the Rocks Remain the Same Peggy Howe
Every Summer Jon Bourne
Romance Margie Emmons
Camp Hale
Democratization of Outdoor Life Bob Twombly
Camp Hale’s Beginnings Geoff Burrows
Harvard Engineering
Harvard Engineering Camp Peter Van Winkle
The Meeting Peter Van Winkle
Order "Voices of Squam"
An extraordinary book that features over 60 compelling interviews with Squam locals and summer residents.
Listing Of Summer Camps On Squam
The first summer camp for boys in the United States was Camp Chocorua, established on Squam Lake in 1881. Many of the Camp’s original documents and ledgers are among the collections of the Squam Archives Center, including the beautifully embellished original musical score of the camp song.
Below is a chronological list of the early boys and girls camps on both Squam and Little Squam Lakes. Many of them started before the name of the Lake changed from Lake Asquam to Squam Lake.
SQUAM LAKE
Camp Chocorua
Operated: 1881-1889
Located: Chocorua (Church) Island
Founder: Ernest Balch
Campers: Boys
Focus: Self-sufficiency, outdoor skills, mastering the lake, community,
responsibility to others
Balch, a Dartmouth dropout, purchased the island for $40 and created the first summer camp in America, an overnight camp for the sons of well-to-do families. To honor the importance of community, campers would cook, clean, build, and do everything themselves. Outdoor activities in nature included classes on swimming, diving, boat work, canoeing and sailing. Ernest Balch’s story was published in the first edition of Summer Camps, 1924, by Porter Sargent and became a model for many new camps on the lake. By1889 Camp Chocorua had amassed a debt of $8,000 and closed.
Groton School Camp
Operated: 1883-1966
Located: Willoughby (Groton) Island
Founder: Endicott Peabody (Founder of The Groton School in Groton MA)
Campers: Underprivileged inner-city boys
Focus: Social programs that fostered a new vision of what childhood could and should be.
The second camp on Squam and in the U.S. was opened in 1883 by the prestigious Groton School in the Boston area -- a wealthy private school with a missionary society that created a summer camp exclusively for “the underprivileged” as well as the wayward, at-risk, and neglected boy of the inner city. During the Progressive Era (1890-1920) many of our child-related laws and attitudes blossomed. All counselors were Groton school students – one of them being Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1920 the Groton School Camp was moved to Mayhew Island on Newfound Lake and operated until 1966. In 1969, with the buildings falling into disarray, several counselors and trustees of Camp Pasquaney resurrected the facility and established the Mayhew Project, serving inner-city boys from Manchester, NH. The Camp is currently operating as the Mayhew Program now serving underprivileged boys throughout New Hampshire.
Camp Asquam
Operated: 1884–1909
Located: Western Shore of Squam
Founder: Rev. John F. Nichols, Dr. Winthrop T. Talbot
Campers: Boys
Focus: Exercising, inspirational periods of rest and thought, care of horses, farm animals and pets, and manual training
John F. Nichols, then a seminary student, was inspired by Balch’s Camp Chocorua, and in 1882 opened Camp Harvard for boys in Rindge, NH. This camp was later taken over by Dr. Talbot who, in 1884 along with Rev. Nichols moved the camp to Squam Lake where it became known as Camp Asquam. Originally there were four buildings; a combination dining hall and cook shack, the director's cabin, and two dormitories that held twenty bunks lined up against the side walls, and at one end of each was a large fieldstone fireplace. Boys were enrolled for a minimum of ten weeks at $14 a week. Excluded were “diseased, mentally defective, vulgar, or delinquent boys.” By 1908 Dr. Talbot was unable to repay the outstanding mortgage and Camp Asquam closed. The next owner, Thomas Wells Farnem, built a personal hunting and fishing lodge on the land, and two years after Farnem died in 1943, the property was sold to Ferris and Helen Thomsen to become Camp Deerwood, which is still operating Farnem’s lodge that has long been Deerwood’s main building.
Camp Algonquin
Operated: 1886 -1930
Located: Algonquin Point
Founder: Edwin DeMeritte
Campers: Boys
Activities: Swimming, canoeing, tennis, baseball, rifle practice, camping, and an emphasis on nature study
Edwin DeMeritte, a native of New Hampshire and a Dartmouth graduate, had been influenced by his experiences at both Camp Asquam and Camp Sherwood Forrest, and established Camp Algonquin in 1886. The camp occupied an eighteen-acre peninsula extending into the lake through a wooded area at the water's edge. The site had ten buildings that included two dormitories with separate dressing rooms, a spacious assembly hall, and a dining room. DeMeritte was especially interested in nature study and on the camp grounds he also established a wild fern and flower garden as well as a camp museum. He continued to conduct the camp until 1930.
Camp Hale
Operated: 1900 - present
Located: Sandwich Bay
Founder: Rev, Ernest Edward Hale
Campers: Boys & Girls ages 6–15 years
Focus: The goal of Camp Hale is for each camper to leave camp with an enhanced sense of well-being, improved social skills, and an awareness of personal potential
The Reverend Hale, who also founded Hale House in Boston’s South End, strongly believed that all youth, particularly those from urban environments, would benefit from challenging opportunities for physical, mental, and social growth development. Currently each summer, Camp Hale serves 225+ boys and girls with an emphasis on instilling values of environmental leadership by engaging youth in the preservation of our natural resources.
Pinelands Camp for Girls
Operated: 1902 -
Located: Dog Cove
Founder: Mercedes Munoz
Campers: Girls
Activities: Rowing, swimming, golf, tennis, physical culture, and foreign language lessons in French, Spanish and German
Adolpho and Mercedes Munoz, originally from Cuba, bought the Sturtevant Farm in Center Harbor, and with the help of Dr. C. Hanford Henderson (a noted educator and friend of Ernest Balch at Camp Chocorua) started Pinelands Camp for Girls in 1902. As published in the first edition of Summer Camps, 1924, by Porter Sargent, “Camp Pinelands, Center Harbor, [has a] well-established, fashionable patronage, under the management of Mrs. Muñoz and Miss Maria L. Dalton.” The girl campers came from throughout the East. The review continued, “The spirit of the camp is earnest and aims to offer girls an outdoor life with special attention to physical training.” Other classes included outdoor sketching, gardening, nature work, handicrafts, sewing, and cooking.
Harvard Engineering Camp
Operated: 1902 -1941
Located: Harvard Cove (now Moultonborough Bay)
Founder: Engineering Division of Harvard Univrsity
Campers: Young male students
Activities: Taught principles of Surveying
The first official Harvard Camp prospectus, dated 1902, enrolled 168 young male students who worked in the hot drafting rooms of the main house, creating imaginary railroads over the fields and up Red Hill. As a mark of their presence “butterflies” inserted in forked sticks dotting the woods. Accommodations were spartan. The camper students lived in forty-one tents on platforms that were spread along the shore. Each tent held three or four woven wire cots. There were no mattresses, and the men were advised to bring at least two army blankets to soften and insulate the springs, plus “plenty of bed clothing for the cold nights.” The camp also provided “tin basins, tin cups, lanterns, hatchets, pails and canteens.” Washing and cleanup were carried out in the chilly lake waters. The rising horn blew at 6am and the men worked from 7:00am to 4:00pm, then again in the evening. Activities were permitted when possible.
Camp Aloha (Summer School Squam Lake)
Operated: 1904 – 1928
Located: Mooney Point
Founder: Emerson A. Kimball
Campers: Boys
Focus: School-test preparation
Camp Aloha efficiently prepared boys for fall examinations at all schools and colleges under expert tutors and the leadership of an association directed by Emerson A. Kimball, Ph.D., of St. Paul's School, Concord, and Edmund W. Ogden from Boston. Only boys who intended to do serious work were accepted and typically came from the leading preparatory schools in the northeast, also some were from Cuba, Panama, Mexico, France, England, and even China. By the time the camp closed in 1928 some 528 students had profited from the system, many entering colleges including Yale, Princeton, and Harvard.
Camp Cloyne
Operated: 1905–1912
Located: Chamberlain-Reynolds Beach
Founder: S. E. Balch, Dr. Oliver Huntington
Campers: Boys
Focus: A revival of the original Camp Chocorua
In 1905, Ernest Balch's brother, along with his brother-in-law, Dr. Oliver Huntington, attempted to revive the traditions and regime of the original Camp Chocorua. Dr. Huntington at one time had been an instructor in mineralogy at Harvard College and went on to establish the Cloyne School in Newport, RI. Cloyne is a small town in County Cork, Ireland. This new camp on Lake Asquam took the name Camp Cloyne. Two campers died when the sand cave they were digging collapsed on them. That tragedy, followed by a fire that burned the main building in1912, caused the camp to close.
Camp Woodcrest
Operated: 1911– 917
Located: Western Shore of Squam (Formerly Camp Asquam)
Founder: Sidney Curtis
Campers: Boys
In 1911, Sidney Curtis, class of 1905 at Harvard, established an arrangement with Thomas W. Farnam who had purchased the 160 acres formally occupied by Camp Asquam and owned by Winthrop Talbot. Curtis wrote in a Harvard Class Report, “For several years I have operated successfully a boys camp on the old site occupied for twenty years by Dr. Talbot at Squam Lake in New Hampshire.” Camp Woodcrest didn’t survive the First World War.
Camp Wakondah
Operated: 1909 -
Campers: Boys and Girls
Focus: Exclusively for friends
Camp Wakondah was established in by Harriett Dryden Jones and Ester C. M. Steele of the Baldwin School, Bryn Mawr, PA. It was a small camp for the friends of the directors and councilors.
Holderness Camp for Girls
Operated: 1914 -
Located: Bennett Cove
Founder: Mrs. A. H. Daugherty
Campers: Girls
Focus: Recreation and music
The girls could study music as much or as little as they wanted. Mrs. Daugherty oversaw piano instruction and gave frequent music lectures. Mrs. Bertha P. Dudley, the camp “mother” was a singing teacher and for many years had been soloist at the West Newton (MA) Congregational Church.
Camp Asquam-in-the-Jungle
Operated: 1915–1970s
Located: High Haith
Founder: Mary Elcock
Campers: Girls
Focus: Health of body and control of mind
Mary Elcock, former Director of Physical Training at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore had been trained under Dudley Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Hemenway Gymnasium. By the turn of the century Elcock had become the nation’s leading voice in physical education. Camp Asquam used the facilities of an old private camp known as “The Jungle” on High Haith. Elcock believed that the outdoor life in the beautiful country with girls of their own age “would encourage energy, self-reliance, and the spirit of social responsibility.”
Singing Eagle Lodge
Operated: 1917—1922, reopened 1975 currently at Camp Deerwood
Located: Bean Cove
Founder: Dr. Ann Tomkins Gibson
Campers: Girls
Focus: Dramatics
Originally located on Bean Cove, the camp was unique and noted for dramatics. In 1975 a group of camp alumnae sought a way to give new generations of girls the kind of camp experience they had loved. Fortuitously, they were invited to use the facilities of Camp Deerwood for two weeks at the end of their summer and a two-week version of the original camp was started.
Camp Pocasset-on-Squam
Operated: 1921 -
Located: Brown Point
Founder: Offshoot of Camp Aloha
Campers: Boys
Focus: Hiking and mountain climbing
Pocasset-on-Squam was a recreational camp located near Brown Point with excellent facilities for swimming, canoeing, and other water sports. Hiking and mountain climbing were featured, and extended camping trips were planned for the more experienced campers. Tutoring was also available. The camp was managed by Edmund W. Ogden who also was a director of Camp Aloha Summer School across the lake on Mooney Point.
Camp Deerwood
Operated: 1945 - currently operating
Located: Western Shore of Squam (Formally Camp Asquam)
Founder: Ferris Thomsen
Campers: Boys
Focus: Fun and challenging activities
In 1945 Ferris Thomsen purchased the land and buildings of the old Camp Asquam and opened Camp Deerwood. The new camp was a friendly and fun place with a well-rounded program that included challenging activities, learning new skills, gaining independence and confidence, as well as making life-long friends. Deerwood is now run by the third and fourth generation of the Thomsen family.
LITTLE SQUAM
Camp Wachusett
Operated: 1903 – currently operating in VT
Located: Northern shore of Little Squam
Founder: Rev. Lorin Webster
Campers: Boys
Focus: Self-sufficiency, outdoor skills, responsibility to others
Since its founding in 1903 along the shores of Little Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire, Camp Wachusett has been in continuous operation every summer except three during World War II. In 1986 the camp moved to its current location on Lake Hortonia, a 450-acre lake in Hubbardton, Vermont. The 40-acre campus had served as Camp Birchwood for girls until 1981 and continues to provide a beautiful setting, with spacious accommodations and facilities as Camp Wachusett for boys. The Rev. Lorin Webster, headmaster of the Holderness School in central New Hampshire, was Wachusett's "Founding Father." There were approximately fifteen boys during the camp's inaugural season. James Henderson was the head counselor that first summer.
Camp Sherwood Forest
Operated: 1903–1914
Located: Eastern Shore of Little Squam Central south side of Little Squam
Founder: Dr. Frank Edward Schubmehl
Campers: Boys
Focus: Self-sufficiency, outdoor skills, responsibility to others
Dr. Schubmehl, who had been Dr. Talbot’s assistant at Camp Asquam, split off taking some boys with him and moved to Little Squam Lake to establish Camp Sherwood Forest on the central, south side of Little Squam. The camp was in operation until 1914 when it was sold to Dr. John B. May and renamed Camp Winnetaska.
Winona Fields
Operated: 1906 -
Located: West End of Little Squam
Founder: Elizabeth M. Fessenden, Ph.B., Mary Ropes Lakeman, M.D
Campers: Girls
Activities: Swimming, canoeing, and overnight camping trips
The main lodge of Winona Fields in Ashland with tents surrounding it was situated on a breezy hilltop overlooking Asquam Lake. Fessenden had a PhD degree, and Mary Ropes Lakeman, M.D., had been a member of the Massachusetts Board of Health. The two founders directed the camp for girls over nine years of age (including college girls), and a Council of the Camp Fire Girls was located within the camp.
Camp Winnetaska
Operated: 1914–1974
Located: South Side of Little Squam
Founder: Dr. and Mrs. John B. May
Campers: Girls, later Boys and Girls
Focus: Canoeing, informal nature study
The camp’s name Winnetaska signifies “the place of pleasant laughter” which perfectly described its ambiance. Dr. May, a graduate of the Boston University Medical School, was a practicing physician who had long been interested in ornithology and botany. He had previously been physician at Camp Algonquin and Sherwood Forest. The female campers typically came from public and private schools in Boston, Pittsburgh, New York, and Philadelphia. In 1929, the operation of Winnetaska was taken over by Mrs. George Whitehouse under the same camp’s name, and from 1931 through 1947 the camp was owned and operated by Mrs. Evangeline Dion Schwartz who split the camp into a girls camp, Camp I’Lee and a boys camp, Camp Jonor. In 1947, Dr. John T. Herfort bought the camp and changed the name back to Camp Winnetaska.
Camp Wawbewawa
Operated: 1920–1929
Located: South side of Little Squam
Founder: Dr. and Mrs. John B. May
Campers: Boys
Focus: Canoeing, water sports, and camp crafts
Camp Wawbewawa was founded by the Mays on the two-hundred-acre Pine Meadows estate. The camp was under the personal direction of Dr. May and his chief of staff, Albert V. S. Pulling, who had been a professor of Forestry at New Brunswick University. Each councilor was a specialist in some activity, and several were especially experienced canoeists. A twelve-day canoe trip on the upper Connecticut River was available to the best canoeists as well as all-around good campers. In 1929, Wawbewawa becomes Little Squam Lodges.
Little Squam Lodges
Operated: 1929–1947
Located: South Side of Little Squam
Founder: Stanley Allen and Mike and Marion Plantamura
Campers: Boys
Focus: A tutoring camp for Worcester Academy
In 1947, the property was sold to Iva and Irv Schwartz who bought Stanley Allen’s share of the camp and as co-owners with the Plantamura’s operated it as Camp Squamasee from 1955 until the property was eventually sold for condos in the mid-70s.