The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps

Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century

By Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson

Rutgers University Press

Although summer camps profoundly impact children, they have received little attention from scholars. The well-known Farm & Wilderness (F&W) camps, founded in 1939 by Ken and Susan Webb, resembled most other private camps of the same period in many ways, but F&W also had some distinctive features. Campers and staff took pride in the special ruggedness of the surrounding environment, and delighted in the exceptional rigor of the camping trips and the work projects. Importantly, the Farm & Wilderness camps were some of the first private camps to become racially integrated.The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century traces these camps, both unique and emblematic of American youth culture of the twentieth century, from their establishment in the late 1930s to the end of the twentieth century. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson explore how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured by the camps to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understandings of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity. To illustrate this change, the authors draw on over forty interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crises of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.

Tamarack Farm, the Farm and Wilderness work camp, changed my life during my four summers. Counsellors and campers opened my eyes to a bigger world and encouraged me to help make it a better world. This book is a labor of love that describes why so many of us feel that way about FW. John Wilhelm, Tamarack Farm 1960–63, retired union president

In this engaging consideration of the Farm and Wilderness camps, the authors use the scholarly tools of their respective disciplines to produce a case-study that is simultaneously deeply respectful and critically analytical. Their willingness to address a range of issues—among them, racial inequality, gender politics, sexual abuse, and the appropriation of Native American culture—make this a must-read, not just for their fellow FW alums, but for anyone committed to seeing summer camps thrive in the 21st century. Abigail A. Van Slyck, author of A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960

EMILY K. ABEL is a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health. She is the author of many books including Prelude to Hospice: Florence Wald, Dying People, and Their Families (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Elder Care in Crisis: How the Social Safety Net Fails Families.

MARGARET K. NELSON is A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emerita of Sociology at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. Most recently she is the author of Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s.

Together, they have also authored Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household.

Chronology
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1          The Founders
2          Ruggedness
3          “Camping from the Neck Up”
4          Gender and Sexual Orientation
5          Sexual Abuse
6          Race
7          Social Class
8          Indian Lore
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Index