Fishing in Twitchell Creek, NY (1903)
Posted on 06/29/2017 5:25:38 AM PDT by SJackson
Fishing in Twitchell Creek, NY (1903)
If you’re going camping this summer, will you rough it on a wilderness hike, or relax in a yurt at a four-star resort? In the late nineteenth century, the tension between savoring the wilderness and recreating civilized life outdoors was very much on the minds of the first recreational campers, as Phoebe Kropp explains.
After the Civil War, camping went from a necessity for soldiers and transient people to recreation for the upper-middle-class. Kropp argues that Victorian-era campers were playing around with the concept of comfort. For the upper-middle-class, keeping a comfortable home—rather than an impoverished or luxurious one—was a sign of respectability. But being “too comfortable,” or over-dependent on civilized society, was a danger.
Camping wasn’t so much a way to experience nature as a chance for people to provide for their own necessities and modest comforts far from the advantages of civilization. Early twentieth-century camping advocate Horace Kephart urged over-civilized men to “go where he can hunt, capture, and cook his own meat, erect his own shelter, do his chores.”
In a journal published in Outing magazine in 1893, writer Charlotte Conover described arriving in the Rockies with eight family members: “The magnitude of our undertaking dawned on us… Nothing to sit on, sleep on, eat on, or cook on; no place to lay a thing down or hang it up; two miles from an egg and six miles from a safety-pin.”
But Conover and her fellow campers quickly found pleasure in recreating a home in the wilderness.
Fishing Victorians From New York Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests report (1898) (via Wikimedia Commons)
Camping brought the domestic work typically done by women into full view. One woman described her husband’s enjoyment of washing dishes in a creek, scouring them with mud and moss. “This recognition prompted the question of who exactly produced the comforts of civilization in an era where the definition of home came to center upon the purported absence of productive labor,” Kropp writes.
For many well-to-do campers, of course, the people who actually did much of the domestic labor at home were servants. That raised the question of whether to bring hired help along on a camping trip. Some families saw camping as a vacation from managing servants, while others appreciated not having to cook or wash the dishes themselves.
In other cases, campers hired “guides” who might explain the local landscape, handle unpleasant chores, and contribute to the campers’ spirit of adventure by embodying entertaining stereotypes. “The ‘Canuck guide,’ the ‘Chinaman cook,’ and the ‘Indians’ became stock characters in some campers’ stories, who contributed equal parts expertise and ethnic flavor,” Kropp writes.
On the whole, though, the appeal of camping was a simplified vision of “natural life” that offered potential real-world lessons.
“Camping became a reassuringly traditional platform on which to audition modern family arrangements, like the servantless household, the corsetless woman, the suburban backyard,” Kropp writes. “Camping made these developments appear to belong more to the familiar figure of the pioneer than an unknown future society.”
I’ll bet metal detector guys flock there
At my age “roughing it” means an RV with black and white TV. 50 or so years ago survival camping was fun.
Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, auto camping tour, 1921
Edison, Ford, Firestone video halfway down the page.
You wouldn’t believe how rewarding metal detecting is in the catskills.
It’s revolutionary war area that hasn’t been built over yet. The Minisink battleground (Where I live) is still untouched.
I think the popularity of the Gibson girl was instrumental in this growth of camping.
The Gibson girl was:
Smart
Capable of activities that previously were the domain of men.
Graceful
They were what we now call gamers.
I always enjoyed the stories about Henry Ford’s camping trips.
ping
There was a long cultural build up to recreational camping. The romanticism of the outdoors goes way back. Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” (1845) so idealized it that it was almost fantasy; and Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” (1872), made it seem like an awesome romp. And there were many, many others.
I’ve got pictures of my great grandparents on various picnics. The women all had on their big hats, men were in suits, ties, hats, and watch chains. But, they were sitting on the ground eating from a huge picnic basket.
Women without corsets?
What’s the world coming to...?
Ping
Much of northern lower-peninsula Michigan is filled with Victorian “cottages” and “cabins” that are larger than your average house is today.
And the new generation of them are still just summer McMansions that people go to to “camp”.
Shenandoah National Park has a hiking loop (The Rapidan) that takes you down to Herbert Hoover’s presidential retreat. Absolutely beautiful, but only a few of the buildings remain. It used to be an entire compound with it’s own trout stream and fishery.
Thanks for posting that - very interesting
The army broke me of camping.
Really rich guys built the great camps like Sagamore in the Adirondacks.
In an age of virgin videography, a steady cameraman and slow panning.
I can watch about 2% of anything anyone does with modern cameras and cell phone videos because they are herky jerky all OVER the place.
They had no electricity or running water and lived in wood shacks.
They were camping already.
I got the Marine Corps to pay me to go camping throughout my late teens and twenties.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.