Jane Addams and her close friend Louise Bowen chose a strange day to buy a summer camp. When they departed Hull House on a cold morning in November 1911, a light snowfall blanketed Chicago. Following a fifty-mile train ride to Waukegan, Illinois, they completed their journey in a horse-drawn sleigh, arriving finally at a plot of land owned by the town’s mayor.Footnote 1 Temperatures had exceeded 100°F the previous summer, however, and the two settlement-house workers craved a permanent site to which they could temporarily remove the city’s working-class children from the hot, congested, and polluted streets.Footnote 2 Having already surveyed sixty-seven locations, Addams and Bowen formulated a stringent set of requirements, and the seventy-two acres overlooking Lake Michigan fit their needs perfectly. Addams reflected that “sometimes one would like to move the ravine from one place, the gentle slopes from another, the woods of oak and birch from another, and put them together in a way Nature herself seldom permits; but in this place all desirable things seem to have been combined.”Footnote 3 The Bowen Country Club opened in the summer of 1912. Referencing poet Percy Shelley at the camp’s inauguration, Addams ruminated that “all of us who live in the midst of the city find ourselves easily stained by the contagion of the world, and to have a place secure from it to which we may repair is not only delightful but necessary to the health of our souls.”Footnote 4 In the decades that followed, 800 to 1,000 children and mothers enjoyed a two week stay at the Bowen Country Club each summer.Footnote 5
Innovative in virtually all aspects of Progressive Era social reform, Hull House’s implementation of summer camping was nonetheless relatively conventional by 1911. According to the Handbook of Settlements, published that year by Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy, eighty-eight settlement houses in Northeast and Midwest cities maintained a dedicated summer camp, also frequently labeled a farm or a summer home. Settlement house camps operated throughout the countryside just outside of metropolises like New York and Chicago, medium-size industrial centers like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and even smaller cities like Columbus, Ohio, and New Haven, Connecticut.Footnote 6 Working-class children affiliated with settlement houses formed the core camp population, and reformers often recruited other children from throughout the city. Settlement-house workers also invited mothers to camp to enjoy a daily routine of relaxation. Camp cost a nominal fee, usually fifty cents to two dollars, but those who could not afford a trip to camp were still welcome. Louise Bowen explained that “I was eager that the camp be called a ‘club’ in order that the children would feel it belonged to them and have a sense of responsibility as to its care. It was decided that a small fee … be asked.”Footnote 7 Funding came predominantly from settlement houses’ annual budgets and from private donors. Prominent benefactors often donated property and funds for camp, and settlement house leaders occasionally solicited money from wealthy families. Men and women who worked for the settlement stayed at the camp all summer, accompanied by nurses, doctors, and cooks.
In the minds of settlement-house workers, these trips enhanced the medical, recreational, and social well-being of their neighbors. Children enjoyed three square meals a day and unlimited supplies of milk. They slept in dormitories, segregated by gender, and the camp routine included a mix of work and play. After completing daily chores, campers enjoyed baseball games, time on the playground, volleyball, and tennis, supplemented with games, dramatic performances, dancing, and crafts. Programming also included activities impossible in the city such as swimming, hiking, berry picking, and nature study.
Efforts to remove working-class children from the city to the countryside had become commonplace among reformers by the Progressive Era. In the 1850s, Charles Loring Brace and the New York Children’s Aid Society endeavored to provide a better life for children in orphanages, prisons, and city streets by relocating them to Midwestern farms.Footnote 8 In the Gilded Age, New York City’s Fresh Air Fund was prominent among organizations that sought to grant working-class children a respite from the urban environment. Founded in 1877 by Reverend Willard Parsons, the fund transported tenement children from New York City to farms in neighboring states, also opening a few summer camps.Footnote 9 These efforts to remove children to the natural environment developed alongside others catering to middle- and upper-class children such as private camps, scouting, and the Woodcraft Indians.
Launching their summer camps, settlement houses fashioned a distinct portion of this larger fresh-air trend based on their environmental vision of the Progressive Era city, which historians have analyzed from several perspectives. This scholarship highlights the work of women like Alice Hamilton, Mary McDowell, or Florence Kelley, who deemed themselves “municipal housekeepers,” lobbying local governments for better garbage removal, as well as regulations on smoke and street pollution.Footnote 10 These reformers advocated on behalf of their neighbors for cleaner and safer housing, often launching public health initiatives which targeted the diseases and malnutrition that ravaged their communities. Middle-class female reformers in the Progressive Era likened the urban environment to the domestic sphere, assuming the responsibility of promoting cleanliness, morality, and the welfare of children and families. Historians such as Maureen Flanagan and Daphne Spain have employed gender as an analytical category to argue that women espoused an environmental perspective of the city distinct from that of men during the Progressive Era.Footnote 11 This scholarship also helps to uncover the important role of women in the environmental history of the United States.Footnote 12
Contextualizing municipal housekeepers within the history of the twentieth century, historians like Robert Gottlieb, Chad Montrie, and Martin Melosi have pinpointed settlement-house workers as important predecessors to postwar environmentalism and environmental justice activism.Footnote 13 They suggest that focusing on the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 or the first Earth Day in 1970 conceals much of environmentalism’s early history. Rather than the postwar spread of pesticides or tract housing, these historians identify nineteenth-century industrialization as the impetus for environmentalism. These historians argue that a deeper narrative better details the scope and complexity of modern-day environmentalism and environmental justice.
This essay builds on existing scholarship to argue that, not simply sites for rest and recreation, summer camps exemplified the environmental agenda of settlement houses during the Progressive Era. Camps demonstrate that settlement-house workers espoused a deeply ecological understanding of environmental hazards that was not evident in reforms like smoke abatement, sanitation, or playgrounds, which addressed isolated components of increasingly interconnected industrial cities. Settlement-house workers constructed camp landscapes and daily programming in response to problems endemic to the atmosphere, city streets, and immigrants’ homes, providing children with a total environmental change while meanwhile pursuing slower and more piecemeal reforms back in the city. Settlement house leaders and other Progressive Era reformers discerned an intimate connection between landscapes and morality, which summer camps also allowed them to address since they could reform individual behavior in addition to combatting structural inequities. This analysis reveals that settlement-house workers’ environmental perspective permeated their entire reform agendas, not only informing politics and public health, but recreation and social work as well. Camp leaders purported to improve children’s physical wellbeing, mental health, educational attainment, social development, and moral growth by providing them with an inherently salubrious environment.
I demonstrate that summer camps epitomized progressive environmentalism by explicating how settlement house leaders infused it into camp landscapes, both natural and physical, as well as children’s engagement with nature through daily programming. At summer camp, spaces and routines which contrasted environmental hazards emanating from each level of the urban environment and which promoted campers’ health existed alongside those which addressed what reformers considered the social and moral shortcomings of urban life. Even more appealing to settlement house leaders was the degree to which many of these spaces and routines addressed both simultaneously. Their environmental vision led them to handpick which aspects of the natural environment to accentuate and which to avoid, intentionally combining aspects of the city and countryside into a distinct camp environment.
Settling the City Wilderness
Moving into cities in the Progressive Era, settlement-house workers encountered tumultuous ecological and social landscapes. According to The City Wilderness, an analysis of Boston’s South End House edited by Robert Woods and published in 1898, “isolated and congested working-class quarters, with all the dangers to moral and material well-being that they present, grow along with the growth of all our great cities.”Footnote 14 The bituminous and anthracite coal powering industrial production emitted thick smoke, which shrouded skylines, trapped heat inside the city, damaged urban trees, and deprived people of the medical benefits accompanying exposure to sunlight. Black soot from burning coal deteriorated buildings, damaged food, and landed on drapes, carpets, and furniture. Smoke and soot ravaged peoples’ health, encroaching on their skin, nostrils, eyes, and most prominently, lungs, causing pneumonia, bronchitis, and asthma. Below the skyline, streets amassed debris from factories, as well as human and animal waste. Primitive garbage collection and sewage systems allowed street and water pollution to spread typhoid, yellow fever, polio, and cholera. Urbanites traversed canopies of dense electric wires, railroad tracks, and other technologies, which polluted the air and pumped jarring noise into the city, triggering hearing loss, stress, and anxiety. Each night, working-class families went home to tenements or apartments where poor air ventilation and vermin left them increasingly susceptible to diseases.Footnote 15
Urban pollution was all-encompassing, but also unequally distributed. As historian Harold Platt explains, “environmental factors strongly reinforced … social patterns of spatial segregation by class and ethnicity/religion.”Footnote 16 Smoke clouded entire metropolitan regions, but wealthier populations could easily escape the soot, dirty streets, and noise endemic to industrial districts. Middle- and upper-class urbanites also comfortably inhabited large family homes located in sparsely populated neighborhoods. Working-class, largely immigrant populations remained clustered in hazardous surroundings.Footnote 17
Settlement-house workers grew deeply concerned with the city’s ecological structure. Alice Hamilton became a major figure in twentieth-century public health after serving as a professor of pathology at Northwestern University and living at Hull House. She famously exposed the danger of lead poisoning in industrial workplaces, as well as other toxins such as arsenic and carbon monoxide.Footnote 18 Hamilton’s investigation of typhoid in Hull House’s neighborhood was representative of settlement workers’ participation in neighborhood surveys, which had become a longstanding public health tool by the Progressive Era.Footnote 19 Pittsburgh’s Crystal Eastman, who trained within the settlement house movement and became instrumental in the Eugene Debs-led Socialist Party, directly addressed environmental issues in The Pittsburgh Survey. Footnote 20 Settlement-house workers such as Chicago’s Mary McDowell also directly targeted the city’s poor sanitation, either taking their concerns to city hall or picking up garbage themselves.Footnote 21 These efforts reached within the homes of working-class immigrants as well. Florence Kelley, for example, pushed legislation to improve sanitary conditions within home workshops that made up the “sweating system.”Footnote 22
Settlement house leaders perceived these environmental hazards as inseparable from the social and moral components of immigrant working-class life, much of which revolved around the living conditions of children. If not playing in dirty alleys or working in factories, they feared children would succumb to gang membership or patronize saloons, dance halls, or amusement parks like New York City’s Coney Island.Footnote 23 Immigrant families practiced Catholicism or Judaism, spoke foreign languages, and raised their children differently than middle-class Protestant Americans. Settlement house workers’ affiliation of environment with morality was not new by the Progressive Era. Scholars have used the term “moral environmentalism” to describe these general patterns of thought. David Scobey defines moral environmentalism as “the belief that natural and built environments exert a profound influence over the ideals and inward capacities of those who experience or inhabit them.”Footnote 24 This perspective appealed to settlement-house workers like Jane Addams, for whom the world’s contagions were both real and imagined.
This progressive environmentalism was central to the settlement house mission. In 1895, leaders of Boston’s Lincoln House implored the city’s wealthy residents to “go on any hot July day to … the little side streets, muggy and ill-smelling, and you will see crowds of children idly sitting in the door-ways or on the curbstone, or perhaps listlessly playing some game. One cannot but feel painfully conscious of the fact that the ill smells and the heat has brought utter moral as well as physical collapse.”Footnote 25 Connections between the material environment and the moral upbringing of the city’s poor were central to how settlement-house workers understood the city’s problems and conceived solutions. As Jane Addams explained, “the settlement…is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city.”Footnote 26 Inspired by London’s Toynbee Hall, the movement began in 1886 with the founding of the University Settlement in New York City. Settlement-house workers came from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, usually growing up in wealthy urban, suburban, and small-town settings. By 1910, over four hundred settlement houses had opened throughout the United States.Footnote 27
Anxieties regarding the urban environment and neighborhood children dovetailed nicely for settlement-house workers, and they frequently addressed the two simultaneously. Reformers often constructed playgrounds and advocated for city parks to provide more wholesome settings for structured play.Footnote 28 These developments represented a trend in Progressive Era reform, which historian Paul Boyer has deemed “positive environmentalism.”Footnote 29 Rather than removing moral ills such as prostitution, gambling, or unconstructive leisure, reformers reasoned that a better environment could drain these problems from the city.
Constructing a Wholesome Environment
While parks and playgrounds aided settlement houses in reforming the urban environment, summer camps arose from even deeper ecological concerns, presenting opportunities to construct landscapes that reflected a unique environmental vision, at once salubrious and amenable to social reform. Camping represented a wholesale rejection of the Progressive Era city’s ecological and social disadvantages, which settlement-house workers considered to be intimately linked. Frank Chapman Van Cleef, the camp director for Hiram House Social Settlement in Cleveland, Ohio, stated in 1904 that “the aim of the camp is to take the neighborhood child from its unfavorable environment in the city, and transplant it into a wholesome atmosphere in the country.” He reasoned that this unfavorable environment emanated from the city’s physical structure, as well as the social and cultural life of the immigrant working class. Describing a wholesome atmosphere, he explained that “an out-door life with reasonable discipline, good food, model living conditions, and plenty of healthy exercise is the proper treatment for the child coming from the congested living quarters of the city.” These congested living quarters not only bred pollution, but also precarious living conditions, and Van Cleef’s quote indicates how settlement workers’ social reform impulses clouded their environmental vision of the city. He concluded that “a general application of this treatment would materially reduce the ravages of the ‘white plague,’ and aid materially in the moral uplift of the community.”Footnote 30 Van Cleef intertwined the public health crisis of tuberculosis and the neighborhood’s sinking morals in his critique of the city and celebration of the tonic provided at camp, revealing the complexity of the environmental perspective, which he and others espoused.
Their immediate desire to escape the city inspired settlement houses in choosing the locations for their summer camps. They searched for sites that were close enough to the city so that children could be transported quickly and abundantly, often by train. Describing the site in Valencia, Pennsylvania, which hosted the summer camp for Pittsburgh’s Kingsley House, William Matthews explained that “twenty miles directly north of the city such a place was found, away from the rivers and hence away from the mills, the shops, the smoke and the fog; where the sun had right of way early in the morning; where the blue sky reigned throughout the day and where the glory of the sunset called to eye and heart at evening time.”Footnote 31 Other settlement houses opened camps in locations similar to Valencia. While Jane Addams and Louise Bowen went north to Waukegan, their colleagues across town at the Chicago Commons Settlement House built their camp in Elgin, Illinois, about forty miles northwest of the city. Hiram House built their camp in Chagrin Falls, a rural village twenty miles southeast of downtown Cleveland. In 1908, Henry Street Settlement, located in New York’s Lower East Side, opened their camp in Putnam County, New York, about fifty miles upstate. Settlement house leaders chose many of these sites for their proximity to trains and other convenient forms of transportation. Finding such locations proved to be a delicate balancing act for settlement house leaders. They consistently sought spaces that were outside the city yet close enough for easy and abundant transportation.
While the nation’s first camps for children of wealthier families opened in wilderness environments like the Adirondack Mountains, the environmental perspective of settlement house leaders led them to instead choose locations they could curate for health and order.Footnote 32 Camps were often located in rural areas or directly on farmland. Settlement houses in East Coast cities built camps by the ocean, and those in the Midwest took advantage of the Great Lakes. In Cleveland, the Council Educational Alliance settlement house opened Camp Wise in Painesville, Ohio, directly on Lake Erie about thirty miles northeast of the city. In New York, the Jacob Riis House settlement built their camp on the Bronx seashore. Settlement house leaders lauded rolling hills, waterfalls, or occasional woodlands as their camp’s predominant natural features when such resources were not available. In 1905, the leaders of Boston’s Hale House raved about the inherent qualities of Camp Hale, located a train ride away from the city on the banks of New Hampshire’s Squam Lake. They wrote that the camp was located “on the side of a hill … which slopes gently toward the lake, ending in a small sandy beach. The sanitary conditions are excellent. The wind blows from the lake at all times, so that the air is continuously being renovated. The immediate vicinity of woods and the separation from roads and houses … makes the spot an ideal one.”Footnote 33 From the perspective of Hale House’s leaders, the advantages of the space derived from its ability to provide sanitary living conditions and fresh air. They were also sure to note the camp’s separation from any sense of urbanity. The camp provided children with tangible environmental benefits, but its distance from the city allowed settlement houses to reform behavior in an isolated space. Historians have noted that leaders of private camps touted the primitive qualities of wilderness amid the overly civilized forces of modernity, but settlement-house workers espoused an inverse philosophy.Footnote 34 The title of Robert Woods’s study, published in 1898, suggests that the city was wilderness as far as settlement-house workers were concerned. Camps represented, in the words of historian Robert Wiebe, a “search for order” from the chaotic urban environment, albeit one located conveniently outside of the city.Footnote 35
After choosing a location, settlement-house workers meticulously planned their camp landscapes, creating expansive and organized spaces through their overall layout and architecture. Private summer camps catering to wealthy children featured a haphazard array of tents, teepees, or cabins designed to accentuate the “wild” qualities of the natural environment. Discussing their camps, settlement-house workers frequently referred to “nature,” a term which environmental historians have debated vigorously, but the spaces they curated often mirrored urban or rural surroundings.Footnote 36 Camp landscapes usually radiated outward from a central building, which served as a cafeteria and general meeting space. Vast fields of grass comprised summer camps’ most prominent feature. Settlement house leaders sprinkled this landscape with gardens, baseball fields, playgrounds, and swimming pools. Campers slept in dormitories, housing orderly rows of bunks and segregated by gender.
From the perspective of settlement house leaders, the expansive quality of summer camps provided children numerous environmental and health benefits of which they were deprived in the city. Playing in wide-open fields or swimming in pools or lakes, campers were imbued with Vitamin D and other nutrients from the sun’s rays to an extent not possible back in their smoky neighborhoods lined with tall buildings. Settlement-house workers also ensured that children spent most of their time outside. For at least two weeks, campers were free from the cramped and poorly ventilated tenements, apartments, schools, and factory floors within which communicable diseases flourished. This aligned with the popular consensus among reformers during this time that open spaces and fresh air held medically curative qualities for urban children.Footnote 37 Camp leaders celebrated these environmental benefits, but children’s health was not their only concern. Settlement-house workers also frequently made connections between children’s health and social development. The leaders of Camp Wise explained that the camp “takes our children from their narrow streets and crowded homes and gives them their first taste of life-giving country air. It puts sunshine into their hearts. It leads them into the realms of imagination.”Footnote 38 Statements like these indicate that settlement house leaders understood the tangible qualities of sunlight and fresh air, but their concerns for children’s health remained inseparable from those surrounding their social development.
Settlement-house workers wrote most enthusiastically about their camp landscapes’ potential to remove children from the smoke and pollution, which permeated the urban environment. Charlotte Meyer, who directed Hiram House Camp in 1911, wrote that “one of the greatest advantages of the camp is, of course, that it furnishes a breathing space for children who are unfortunately deprived of fresh air in the city.” She pinpointed smoke and cramped living quarters as responsible for depriving children of this breathing space. Meyer explained that “when children going home from camp are overheard saying…that they wish they could go back to camp because they ‘cant breathe in the city’… it is quite apparent that the effort made to give them a chance to breathe for two weeks is surely appreciated.”Footnote 39 It is difficult to discern the authenticity of such statements, but scholarship on the realities of urban air in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that fresh air was more than a metaphor for settlement-house workers.Footnote 40
Settlement house leaders also celebrated fresh air’s ability to strengthen children’s mental health by granting them a break from the noise and rapid pace of urban life. The sounds that surrounded children in the city, originating from neighbors, cars, and factories, would be replaced by the tranquility of the rural environment. In 1905, Frank Chapman Van Cleef ruminated that “fourteen hours of hard play in the fresh air makes you want to sleep the other ten, and in no time after lights were out the steady, deep breathing alone told of the pent up life and energy that were at rest under the big roof rafters of the House in the woods.”Footnote 41 Van Cleef was not alone in depicting urban life as mentally stressful for working-class children, and he and his colleagues considered camp the perfect antidote.
Settlement house leaders perceived camp as an important remedy to the injustices that arose from smoke and pollution. In 1914, Charles Cooper contrasted the death rate in Kingsley House’s Third Ward neighborhood and that in the wealthier Eleventh Ward. While 12 per 1,000 died in the Eleventh Ward each year, a staggering 16.9 per 1,000 died in the Third Ward. Cooper directly attributed this disparity to differences in the urban environment. After detailing the settlement’s work in education, recreation, and welfare in the “Kingsley Record,” he explained that “Kingsley Association also endeavors to fight this death rate by sending hundreds of mothers, babies and children every year to Lillian Home, at Valencia, Pa., where there are ninety acres of God’s Own Country to be used by the people living in the poorer sections of our city.”Footnote 42 For Cooper and others, leaving the city was literally a matter of life and death for the children of their neighborhoods. More than just an opportunity for recreation, summer camp provided a crucial means through which they countered this environmental injustice.
While the vast camp landscape provided children with tangible environmental benefits and temporarily levelled injustices, it nonetheless presented settlement-house workers with an opportunity to counter what they considered the city’s immorality, beginning with its aesthetic qualities. Settlement-house workers designed their space in the city as a means of enriching what they deemed the culturally and intellectually barren existence of the working class. They adorned their buildings with clean rooms, expensive furniture, and art, often using natural elements like flowerboxes or rooftop gardens. The Godman Guild, located in Columbus, Ohio, boasted a community garden, and when it first opened in 1898, Harlem’s LaGuardia Memorial House was originally named the “The Home Garden.”Footnote 43 The perceived beauty and decorum of flowers and other natural elements provided settlement houses with an opportunity to craft a more enlightened environment for working-class children.
Designing their camps’ overall layout, settlement house leaders regularly interspersed open fields with gardens, eschewing weeds or shrubs, which were native to the surrounding countryside, in favor of roses and other flowers. The leaders of the Godman Guild proclaimed that their founders “saw the perverting influences of ugly, brutal environment on the children of the back streets and alleys. They knew that to growing children of the city, there is no greater gift than a sojourn in the country.”Footnote 44 Camp leaders were apt to promote the beauty of the camp environment, often hiring professional gardeners. Louise Bowen was not alone when she hired a gardener who had previously worked in Bar Harbor, Maine.Footnote 45 Arriving at camp, children discovered a beautiful environment that was deliberately presented to them by reformers.
Other elements of the camp landscape such as baseball fields and playgrounds also allowed settlement house leaders to address the social and moral components of their environmental beliefs. These aspects of the camp landscape allowed settlement-house workers to direct how children played and interacted with each other. In 1911, Hiram House’s Charlotte Meyer wrote that camp presented “the opportunity to instil [sic] a few morals into the child’s mind. The great lessons of what is right and wrong, of property rights, consideration for others, administration of justice, obedience, personal cleanliness and various other questions come up on all occasions.”Footnote 46 Playing baseball and other games, campers would learn to obey the rules and their counselors’ directions. The wide-open camp landscape provided healthful and aesthetic surroundings, but it also facilitated settlement house workers’ moral lessons.
Within their summer camps’ sprawling layouts, settlement house leaders constructed dining halls, meeting spaces, and dormitories to promote living and eating arrangements conducive to both a more healthful environment and the opportunity to reform children’s social and moral development. Many of these buildings provided a more salubrious environment than the tenements to which children were accustomed. The leaders of New York’s Hartley House were not alone when they wrote that “an important health contribution of the settlement is its summer program.”Footnote 47 At summer camp, children were entirely removed from their neighborhoods, which often lacked proper sewer and sanitation systems, making communicable diseases easier to spread. Camp leaders held complete control over garbage removal and children’s access to water. Buildings were also decidedly larger and more expansive than tenements, and settlement house leaders made sure to leave doors and windows open to facilitate air filtration. Children slept in individual bunks, which separated them from each other and gave them greater access to fresh air than their cramped living arrangements back home. Settlement house leaders’ notions of cleanliness were nonetheless entwined with their social reform agenda. In 1903, the director of Hiram House Camp wrote that “the girls were taken into the creek to bath by conscientious teachers who helped them to bath and rubbed each girl to a glowing color. The girls soon learned to care for themselves in this way and became clean and neat.”Footnote 48 Settlement house leaders understood the urban environment as structurally underdeveloped and unclean, but this example suggests that they also worked to improve what they considered working-class immigrants’ cultural shortcomings.
While constructing and arranging camp buildings provided tangible environmental benefits, it also presented an opportunity for settlement house leaders to improve what they considered deficiencies in children’s home lives. The leaders of Boston’s South End House explained that “it is hard to imagine more discouraging housing than that in which our neighbors find themselves; and the quickening of the spiritual life for which we long can hardly come until tenements show more beauty, cleanliness and privacy.”Footnote 49 Simple buildings were arranged in formal groupings to project a sense of orderliness and cleanliness, which settlement house leaders considered lacking from haphazard urban streets, and which could serve as a model for families. Through palatial construction, camp leaders also reasoned that they could instill a sense of permanence for working-class families who rented, moved frequently, or relied on familial connections for housing. Reflecting on the construction of Kingsley House’s camp outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Charles Cooper wrote in 1915 that “at Valencia, there stands a noble building, thoughtfully designed, equipped with care, and ready for its greater usefulness. … Every effort has been made to build and furnish this structure for permanency.”Footnote 50 Settlement house leaders cast the urban environment as morally deficient, partly blaming the lifestyles of working-class immigrant families, hoping that camps could provide a model of a better alternative.
Settlement house leaders’ environmental perspective created a camp landscape exuding both social justice and social control, and this dynamic was on full display at mealtimes. Camp leaders regularly foregrounded their annual reports with data on the total number of meals served. In 1913, the leaders of Hiram House explained that “there were 162 meals served to the children.” This included 1,520 loaves of bread, 963.5 gallons of milk, 1,191 eggs, 157 pounds of butter, 47.5 bushels of potatoes, and 46 pounds of hot dogs.Footnote 51 These statistics were followed by information regarding the camp’s collective weight gain. In 1919, William Lawall, camp director of New York City’s Jaob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, bragged that “two boys have broken all former records in weight, one gaining 11 pounds and the other 9 pounds, while the majority gained three pounds in two weeks.”Footnote 52 Historians have shown that malnutrition led to poor attendance and behavioral problems for urban school children during the early twentieth century, prompting reformers to advocate for school lunches and other initiatives.Footnote 53 Thanks to these meals, campers’ overall nutrition undoubtedly improved, but they were also required to recite a note of thanks before receiving breakfast, lunch, or dinner. William Lawall explained that “in New York city from sixty to seventy per cent of the children are suffering from malnutrition. As a result they frequently lack the characteristics of a normal child in morals and at play.”Footnote 54 Lawall’s conclusions likely catered to settlement house’s donors in order to justify the camp’s large food budget. Drawing a correlation between malnutrition and morality helped him to do that, but it also reveals the distinctiveness of the environmental perspective held by settlement house leaders. Malnutrition was a legitimate public health concern, but settlement-house workers melded it closely to their social reform agenda.
Discovering Nature’s Fairylike Charm
In addition to camp landscapes, settlement house leaders also infused their environmental vision into daily programming, paying close attention to how children encountered their environments. Daily camp schedules intermixed work with play, freedom with routine, and relaxation with mentally and physically strenuous activities. The leaders of Hoyt Farm, directed by New York City’s Hartley House, wrote in 1901 that “there are few rules at Hoyt Farm, as it is primarily a place for freedom and pleasure, but, believing that true enjoyment for all can come only when principles of order and punctuality are observed, the children, even in their brief fortnight, are required to obey such regulations as have been necessary.” These camp leaders further explained that children were “under almost constant supervision, primarily to direct their work and play, in order to make their brief association with an orderly, well-kept home and an untrammeled, natural playground as genuinely helpful and suggestive to them as possible.”Footnote 55 Camp routines usually revolved around large blocks of scheduled time. After waking up and eating breakfast, campers spent a few hours doing chores or activities like hiking, baseball, nature study, or crafts. A communal activity like swimming or lunch broke up the day, and the afternoon was devoted to more activities. Evening programs included dramatics, singing, or campfires.
Nature was central to the camp routine. Woods and Kennedy lauded “that fairylike charm which flowers possess to clear the mind, strengthen the better emotions, uplift the imagination, and refine manners.”Footnote 56 Scholars have detailed how early twentieth-century reformers and teachers promoted nature study as a component of progressive education and a means of encouraging appreciation for the natural environment.Footnote 57 Whether or not they explicitly deemed it nature study, settlement houses incorporated interaction with the surrounding environment into their camp programs. Working and playing within these rural environments provided a conduit through which they could address children’s education, recreation, and working conditions while simultaneously imposing some lessons regarding morality and work ethic.
Nature was new for many working-class children, and so it provided a valuable outlet for intellectual curiosity and educational lessons in the minds of settlement house leaders. Camp leaders taught children new types of flowers, trees, and wildlife. In 1901, the leaders of New York City’s Hartley House wrote that “all come together under the trees for an informal talk with a teacher upon some phase of nature-the clouds overhead, the adjacent brook, the butterflies, squirrels, birds or flowers.” In addition to specific lessons about entomology, geology, or botany, camp leaders pursued more generalized educational goals. At the Hartley House camp, leaders further elaborated that “children are encouraged to observe, question and deduce for themselves. … In every instance the lesson, while of a suggestive, informal nature and one inviting spontaneous response, is at the same time formal to the degree that it requires of every member of the class an individual result, mental or material.”Footnote 58 Following these lessons, children collected flowers, wrote poetry, or sketched what they observed.
Educational lessons from the natural environment were inseparable from middle-class reformers’ conceptions of proper morals. Louise Bowen reflected that “sometimes the children look at my roses and I try to tell them that those roses come up from the ground, then blossom, and contribute to the beauty of the place and give them something they like to see. It would seem to me they ought to feel they must return it; they must produce something to make the world happier.”Footnote 59 In this example, Bowen provided children with a valuable lesson, which they probably did not receive as experientially in school, but this rural environment also provided the opportunity to relay a sense of the importance of productively giving back to society. Leaders also stressed the sense of pride that should come with ownership as their campers interacted with the camp environment. In general, camp was a vehicle to discuss the natural environment’s sense of beauty and decorum, which settlement houses promoted.
Weary of children’s urban working conditions, settlement houses celebrated summer camp as an essential two-week vacation, and the rural environment as a source of both physical and moral rejuvenation in contrast to the factory floor. Alice Hamilton reflected the consensus from a medical perspective when she wrote that “any doctor would strenuously oppose sending the boy or girl into a factory for eight hours of work indoors.”Footnote 60 She and other progressive environmentalists reasoned that the camp environment provided a nice antidote to the ravages of work on boys and girls, but this perspective also contained a tinge of concern for children’s social and moral development. Writing about the Bowen Country Club, Jane Addams ruminated that “the peculiar charm of the place … is the sense of being basically at ease which can come only when the play instinct is reduced to relaxation and developed in an understanding atmosphere.”Footnote 61 Simply spending their time studying and playing in the camp environment was a welcome alternative to working or sitting idly on porch steps. The understanding atmosphere that Addams described was also removed from what she considered the moral ravages of the city.
While camp leaders disliked the factory, they still promoted labor as a means of advancing their reform agendas, particularly their ideas surrounding proper gender roles. Work was segregated by gender and settlement-house workers engrained the middle-class conception of separate spheres within the camp landscape. Boys did manual labor while girls performed domestic chores.Footnote 62 Van Cleef explained that, at Hiram House Camp, “the girls went about the house work, washing the dishes, sweeping the rooms, halls and porches, and preparing vegetables for dinner. The boys, however, had a variety of work which, if it was harder and longer, was more interesting, and made more muscle.”Footnote 63 This included pumping water, carrying wood, dredging the lake, and constructing hiking trails.
Mobilizing an Army for Fresh Air
Throughout the Progressive Era, camping became both extremely popular among children and intrinsically valuable to settlement houses. It is difficult to discern how campers perceived their experiences, but the evidence suggests that it had an immediately positive impact. A camp leader from New York City’s Hudson Guild settlement was not alone when he quoted a former camper who reportedly wrote that “when sleep comes not in my eyes at night I play like this-that I am by the farm again picking those real flowers that do not smell like what we make [in the factory].”Footnote 64 It is easy to paint such positive reports as construed by camp directors seeking approval from their superiors or funding from donors, but they are nonetheless tempered by sporadic critiques. Mildred Mudgett wrote of her experience as a camp counselor for Manhattan’s Sea-and-Land settlement house that “accustomed as they were to the roar of the elevated, the quiet of the country terrified them.”Footnote 65 The existence of such conflicting accounts suggest that camp workers’ glowing reports were truthful to some extent.
Beyond what they purportedly said about their experiences, children and their parents displayed satisfaction with camp in other ways. Upon returning to the city, children frequently lobbied to return the next summer. Kingsley House bragged that one mother begged them to “please find a vackency in the Lilyne Home with next party or later … two years ago … the trip did my boy all the good in the world and me also.”Footnote 66 In 1915, the settlement house’s administration was overflowing with applications to attend camp. That August, following the completion of the camp’s fifth trip out of seven total, Charles Cooper explained that “we have already taken over 1300 mothers, babies and children. Our applications so far, have numbered over 4800.”Footnote 67 Like other settlement houses, Kingsley House maintained a long waitlist.
The success and popularity of camping persisted beyond the summer. Campers frequently formed and maintained alumni clubs, which lasted for decades. Lillian Wald, who created New York’s Henry Street Settlement, frequently praised an alumni group called the Henry Oldtimers. In 1949, the group invited Henry Morganteau Jr., former secretary of the treasury under Franklin Roosevelt, to be their guest of honor at Wald’s birthday celebration. They wrote that “this is a group of men who came to Henry Street, and to Camp Henry when they were young, and the memory of it means so much to them that they have banded together to help the present generation carry on. In the last ten years they have practically rebuilt our boys’ camp and have made very substantial contributions to the settlement”Footnote 68 These men were not alone in their commitment to settlement-house summer camps, which they forged during their experiences in the Progressive Era.
Settlement-house workers considered camping an integral component of their work and overall programming. In 1916, the leaders of Grosvenor Neighborhood House, located in East Midtown Manhattan, bemoaned “the close of the hardest year” the settlement “has experienced since its beginning” a few years prior. That summer, the settlement’s inability to combat a polio epidemic was compounded by the misfortune that they could not give the neighborhood’s children “their usual vacation in the country.” Grosvenor House’s leaders proclaimed that “infinitely better results can be obtained … if all the children are sent to the country for at least ten days or two weeks.”Footnote 69 Grosvenor House’s leaders directly attributed their lack of a summer camp program to the settlement’s general shortcomings, and especially those considering the public health of the neighborhood. In annual reports, monthly newsletters, and other publications, settlement house leaders allotted camping its own special section, depicting it as an important component of their work. Many of them considered camp to be their most successful program. In Minneapolis, the leaders of Wells Memorial Settlement House wrote that “contact with the residents is more continuous than is possible in the city, and the best, most intensive work with boys and girls is accomplished at summer camp.”Footnote 70 While not all settlement house workers went this far, they nonetheless regarded camp as a centerpiece of their programming.
Settlement workers considered camp a qualitatively valuable experience, but they also bragged of their success in efficiently transporting children to camp in large quantities. When they reported on camping, the most important statistic was the number of children who attended each year. William Lawall, the superintendent of New York’s Jacob Riis House, was not alone when he bragged in 1919 that “We have cared for … a total of 3685 since 1904. Of this entire army no child was ever afflicted with sickness while under our care.”Footnote 71 Others used similar language. Camp leaders were constantly in contact with other settlement-house workers back in the city who recommended children for two-week trips to camp. When children returned, settlement-house workers kept in touch, and made sure that they were recruited in the ensuing summers.
Conclusion
Reflecting on her career at Hull House in 1930, Jane Addams wrote that “the Bowen Country Club really illustrates perhaps better than anything else … the results of the play instinct coming to flower in a sheltered place where beauty and decorum are cherished.”Footnote 72 She did not elaborate on why she believed this, but it was perhaps because camping provided Hull House with more than just an outlet for recreation, and the neighborhood’s children with more than just play. Summer camps exemplified the environmental agenda of settlement house leaders like Jane Addams during the Progressive Era. Camps demonstrated that settlement-house workers espoused a deeply ecological understanding of environmental hazards, which was not evident in reforms like smoke abatement, sanitation, or playgrounds, which addressed isolated components of increasingly interconnected cities. Addams and her colleagues throughout the United States constructed camp landscapes and daily programming in response to problems endemic to the atmosphere, the city streets, and immigrants’ homes, providing children with a total environmental change while meanwhile pursuing slower and more piecemeal reforms back in the city. Settlement house leaders and other Progressive Era reformers discerned an intimate connection between landscapes and morality, which summer camps also allowed them to address since they could reform individual behavior in addition to combatting structural inequities. This analysis reveals that settlement house workers’ environmental perspective permeated their entire reform agendas, not only informing politics and public health, but recreation and social work as well. Camp leaders purported to improve children’s physical wellbeing, mental health, educational attainment, social development, and moral growth by providing them with an inherently salubrious environment.
Settlement-house workers carved out a unique segment of what had already become a well-established trend of fresh air reform by the Progressive Era. Woods and Kennedy wrote that “the instinctive desire for a scheme more personal in its care of health, its organization or recreation and its associated activity than that provided by centrally organized fresh-air societies led them to establish rural resorts of their own.”Footnote 73 Other agencies certainly envisioned a contrast between the city and the countryside, but they did not sharpen it as vehemently as settlement houses. Historian Tobin Miller Shearer explains that “those writing about Fresh Air programs rarely nuanced the urban/rural dichotomy.”Footnote 74 Settlement houses did nuance this dichotomy based on their experiences living in working-class neighborhoods. They critiqued the city from the same environmental perspective that inspired them to fight structural inequities such as pollution and dilapidated housing stock, while simultaneously teaching immigrant children how to bathe themselves. Rather than a blanket assumption that nature was inherently curative, they meticulously constructed camp environments that addressed their concerns.
Settlement house summer camps not only represented a unique portion of the fresh air movement, but a significant one as well, regarding size, scope, and ideological consistency. While the Fresh Air Fund operated primarily out of New York, settlement house summer camps dotted the urban landscape from the East Coast to the burgeoning Midwest.Footnote 75 While every settlement was different, they nonetheless held similar philosophies and tactics. Their numbers were indeed prodigious. Bragging that they served 800 to 1,000 children each summer, Jane Addams and her Hull House colleagues actually lagged behind other camps. While in 1904, Cleveland’s Hiram House served 1,200 children, in 1910, Pittsburgh’s Kingsley House served 3,571 children and mothers.Footnote 76 On smaller scales, New York’s Hudson Guild served 550 in 1920, while Columbus’ Godman Guild served 127 in 1911.Footnote 77 Each summer during the Progressive Era, tens of thousands of children attended settlement house summer camps, experiencing relatively similar landscapes and engagement with nature.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Bartow Elmore, Paula Baker, and Clayton Howard for providing helpful feedback on this article. The author also wishes to thank Melanie Kiechie and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.
