When Did Summer Camp Get So Luxe?

This story is part of Happy Camper, a package about classic summer camp style in all its glory.

A century ago, a debate raged among summer camp directors about whether modernity was ruining the camping experience. Camp Dudley, a prominent boys’ camp in the Adirondacks, had recently transitioned from tents to cabins, with the help of donations from its Princeton alumni. Other private camps were installing flush toilets and electricity. To Progressive-era reformers who promoted nature and fresh air as ways to combat the ills of urbanization, these upgrades were bridges too far.

George Meylan, the director of Maine’s White Mountain Camp for boys, bemoaned what he saw as unnecessary luxuries at newfangled camps. In Spalding’s annual camp guide, Meylan wrote of the pressure to "rival with summer hotels," leading camps to offer silly indulgences like "a candy store," "marble bathrooms," and "sun parlors." He may or may not have been exaggerating, but his point was that too much convenience got in the way of kids developing "noble manhood and good citizenship" in the rugged outdoors.

Around the same time, Frank Hackett, president of the Camp Directors Association, offered a similar assessment to his colleagues in a trade journal: "Without something of pioneer experience, a camp cannot satisfy."

It’s not hard to imagine traditionalists like Meylan and Hackett balking at the elaborate facilities of some present-day summer camps, which boast amenities like zip lines and windsurfing. To them, camp meant arduous hikes, bonfires made from scratch, rainy nights in canvas tents, and canoe trips across the lake. These camps measured authenticity by their distance from the industrialized world, which often meant borrowing from Native American cultures, appropriating perceived versions of Indigenous languages, symbols, and customs like living in tepees, using totem poles, and donning face paint. Camp pioneers like the Boy Scouts’ Ernest Thompson Seton blatantly espoused "noble savage" stereotypes. And yet, these same camps were some of the most elite—and expensive—in the country. Pretty much ever since the inception of sleepaway camp, the ones aimed at the rich have had to grapple with a paradox: Camp is a woodsy adventure, but it can also be a marker of wealth and exclusivity.

For modern families who can afford it, the uneasy balance between nature and luxury has seemingly never been higher. The idea is ostensibly to give kids a taste of the great outdoors, but not without a suite of creature comforts like private bathrooms and air-conditioning. Camp is where you go to discover yourself—so here are a dizzying number of sports and activities to choose from. Mirroring the college amenities arms race, the most prestigious summer camps often ratchet up their offerings to absurd levels.

Ever since the inception of sleepaway camp, the ones aimed at the rich have had to grapple with a paradox: Camp is a woodsy adventure, but it can also be a marker of wealth and exclusivity.

It’s not as if rich-people camps are new. "From the beginning, for some families, camp was an expression of their elite status," says Leslie Paris, an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia and author of Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. During the interwar years, summer camp went from niche activity to a rite of passage for the well-to-do, complete with frills like "horseback riding or Grecian dancing," says Paris. She explains that by 1930, two-thirds of Vassar’s freshman class had gone to some kind of camp. Theirs was a controlled, safe, often appropriated version of the wilderness. The upper crust "wanted their kids to have an experience in the woods," Paris says, "but that doesn’t mean they wanted their kids to be in completely rustic conditions."

Not all summer camps have historically been cost-prohibitive. There have always been some that are far less concerned with niceties than with ideology—from cheap YMCA camps to even cheaper Boy and Girl Scouts troops to nonprofit getaways for the kids of tenement-dwelling Jewish immigrants. Progressive activists touted camp not only as a way to support children’s wellbeing, but a way to Americanize immigrant kids and their families. Regardless of any enrichment for kids, camps have always served a practical function of filling the childcare gap in a country that leaves parents to fend for themselves during the summer.

But lately, the price tag on any type of sleepaway camp has gone through the roof, especially with inflation, and since thousands of camps permanently closed during the height of Covid, securing a spot is increasingly stressful for parents. Summer camps are also becoming more and more specialized as anxiety about college admissions rises. Lots of parents think that "teens should be doing something valuable to their college applications," says Sandy Fox, author of The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America. Proponents of summer camp have always talked about improvement, but their sense of what that improvement entails has shifted.

The symbolism of camp still looms large in American popular culture; even people who never went can picture the s’mores, the bunk raids, the ditties around a fire. Yet across class lines, it’s becoming less accessible to have that classic summertime experience. Perhaps that’s why camp’s aesthetic has crossed over from quasi-quaint to unapologetically chic. Zeitgeisty celebrity brands have hosted their own bucolic "camp" weekends for full-grown adults, though unlike the turn-of-the-century camp directors, they don’t seem the least bit concerned with "authenticity": The Wing’s $425 two-day retreat (held a few years before the flashy feminist coworking community shuttered) came with complimentary Puma sneakers, Fresh face masks, a hidden dive bar, and workshops on the art of the cheeseboard. The four-night Camp Poosh influencer event put on by Kourtney Kardashian’s lifestyle brand, which this year coincided with Coachella, shelled out for welcome kits with silk sleeping bags and pajamas, cannabis vape pens, and HEPA air purifiers. (Guess California’s desert air wasn’t exactly refreshing?)

And some celebs invoke the magic of summer camp for far more personal reasons than just savvy marketing: Actress Beanie Feldstein, who loved camp so much that she’d want to run one if she wasn’t acting, recently had a camp-themed wedding with producer Bonnie-Chance Roberts. It took place at Cedar Lakes Estate, an erstwhile New York summer camp for inner city youth whose cottages now feature rain showers and king-size beds. The nuptials—with custom-embroidered bandana tablecloths, friendship bracelets, and make-your-own s’mores for dessert—were covered in Vogue. The brides both wore Gucci.

All of it echoes the same age-old dilemma about the function of summer camp. Are these experiences meant to be a physical challenge and a pushback on modernity, or just a fresh-air extension of our normal, diversion-heavy lives? Is it possible—or desirable—for elements of both to coexist?

Seen one way, brands and celebrities putting sleepaway camp through a fun-house mirror of wealth seems gauche or clueless. (Poosh, did ya really have to hire Kardashian event planner Mindy Weiss?) But our enduring affection for the feeling and energy of camp might also reveal that undeniable truth, one that most former campers know in their bones regardless of socioeconomic status: Going to sleepaway camp is usually an indelible and transformative experience.

Paris says that though the impact of sleepaway camp on children is woefully under-studied, the oral history work she’s done shows that the intensity of living as a group around the clock often has a profound effect. Time bends and bonds. Away from everyday distractions, kids discover new layers, new fears, new passions. So for many children, including wealthy ones, both nature and bells and whistles may end up being beside the point. Experts also acknowledge nostalgia as a positive force that helps people find meaning in their lives. So even if those canoeing campers turn into rich adults, even if they never roughed it in the first place, the value of that sentimental yearning may be camp’s most powerful benefit.

Top Image: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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