The New Promised Land: Maine's Summer Camps for Jewish Youth ...

1885, Samuel Dudley, under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association,
founded Camp Dudley in Westport, New York. In 1886, Edward DeMeritte founded
Camp Alogonquin in New Hampshire, just a few miles from Asquam. In 1890,
Professor Albert L. Arey founded Camp Arey. In 1892, John M. Dick founded another
camp in New Hampshire, Camp Idlewood, and Gregg Clarke founded the first
Keewaydin Camp in 1893. Porter Sargent, a leading social critic and esteemed
expert on the education system noticed that there were so many camps and started
publishing annual handbooks of summer camps starting in 1924. As he wrote in a
later edition, “by the end of the [nineteenth] century there were about a score of
camps for boys.” 20 Though few of these camps survived into the twentieth century,
by the time Sargent published his 1931 Handbook, Sargent counted 3234 camps in
the United States, which suggests that the number of camps grew rapidly in the first
thirty years of the twentieth century.
Interestingly, Americans saw the need to give disadvantaged populations a
summer camp opportunity right away. In 1875, Eliza Turner of Philadelphia
founded “Country Week.” That spring, she invited twelve underprivileged girls to
spend two weeks at her farm in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania. According to Eells,
Turner “and a friend assembled the children, cared for them, and introduced them
to the wonders of farm and country life.” 21 The next summer, Turner arranged for
her friends and neighbors to do the same thing, and by 1877, they formed an
association and called it Country Week. They turned it into an organization with an
operating board, and by 1910, they were able to serve 3,000 children. In 1877,
20 Ibid, 40.
21 Eells, Eleanor Eells’ History of Organized Camping, 44.
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