Up to me -- Scouting for a camp -- Beautiful place, beautiful country -- Traveling to camp -- Camp Meenahga and the Great War -- Rise and shine -- Fit as a fiddle -- Social graces -- Music, writing, and good eating -- The bitter with the sweet -- Games, capers, and characters -- Foreboding winds, dead calm -- Suddenly, goodbye.
Summary:
"In 1916, two women from St. Louis, Alice Orr Clark and Kidy Mably, established Camp Meenahga, a summer camp for girls in Door County, Wisconsin, with big ideas, little money, and no experience. Clark and Mably believed their camp in picturesque Peninsula State Park near the community of Fish Creek, was the perfect place for young women to escape the oppressive summer heat, get active, learn woodcraft, and refine their manners. They were right. Over more than thirty summers, 2,000 young women were guests of the camp, where they learned to swim, sail, canoe, hike, tell campfire stories, and make memories. From the Lookout is an account of these experiences, a history of Camp Meenahga informed largely by what campers left behind, including letters home, notes from Clark and Mably, and pages from the camp newsletter Pack and Paddle. The chapters in From the Lookout cover everything from the daily rituals of camp life, such as making the bed for inspection or singing songs at meals, to how the camp and its campers responded to and participated in major world events such as World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Brimming with nostalgia and colored by recollections of brilliant Door County sunsets over Green Bay, From the Lookout brings to life the sights and sounds of an idyllic summer retreat, one that long after it closed lived on as a place of respite in the minds of those that knew it best. Today only a few physical traces of Camp Meenahga remain in a state park visited by over a million people a year. Many walk unknowingly over the same woodland trails and shorelines beloved by a generation of campers who every summer called the park their home"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.