[This week, I’ll
be camping with family up in Maine’s
beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts
for this longstanding
form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in
comments, please!]
Two vital
lessons we can learn from the father of American camping.
I couldn’t
possibly do a better job telling the amazing American story
of Frederick Gunn, the educational reformer, abolitionist, and activist considered
“the father of recreational camping,” than does this wonderful ConnecticutHistory.org
piece by scholar and Gunnery School
historian Paula
Gibson Krimsky. Along with urging you to read that piece before you
continue with my post, I’ll also note that (at least of the mid-June moment in
which I’m writing this post), CT Humanities,
the vital organization that runs ConnecticutHistory.org among many other
resources and projects, is in serious danger of disappearing, having had its
funding cut entirely from the state budget by Governor Malloy. After you
read that piece and before you return here, I’d ask you to support CT Humanities
in any and every way you can—I know Frederick Gunn would agree that such public
and communal humanities organizations represent an essential part of education,
civic life, and American society.
Welcome back! Clearly
Gunn’s life and work have a great deal to teach us, on many topics; but here I
want to emphasize a couple lessons related specifically to his emphasis on the
great outdoors and on recreational camping (as Krimsky’s piece notes, Gunn’s
1861 two-week camping trip with a group of students is considered by the American Camping
Association to be their historical origin point). For one thing, Gunn would
most certainly argue with my use of the term “escape” in the bracketed intro
section for this week’s series; to him, the Gunnery camping trips, like all
explorations of the natural world, were a vital part of the education he and
his school offered, a necessary complement to the students’ classroom work. The
first 1861 trip drove home that point with particular clarity, as the campers
spent time practicing military drills in preparation for Union Army service
during the Civil War; not sure any camping activity could be more overtly
distinct from the concept of “escape” than that. But Gunn and the school
continued the trips long after the war’s end, and so they became a more
overarching and philosophical component of his educational and service work—and
thus remain a powerful argument for what camping can add to our identities and
communities.
To this day,
however, as I’ll analyze at length in the week’s final post, camping is
associated with some ethnic and racial communities in America much
more than others. And on that note as well Gunn and his school and camp
have a great deal to contribute to our collective conversations. Gunn’s
abolitionism and his educational reform efforts were very much of a piece, as
he saw his school as helping prepare students and citizens for a future society
that would be transformed by such activism and would require new skills and
perspectives as a result. Although Gunn did not, as far as I can tell, have
African American students in his school and camp during his lifetime, I hope
and believe that was due to circumstance rather than prejudice—a hope given
credence by Gunn’s early 1870s admission of four Chinese students who were part
of Yung
Wing’s Chinese Educational Mission in nearby Hartford. In any case, Gunn
seems very likely to have seen camping in precisely the same progressive and
egalitarian light as he did education and society—and that’s a light that we
could still do a far better job shining consistently on the possibility and
power of recreational camping.
Next camping
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?
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