Kitchen Technologies and Mealtime Rituals

Interpreting the Food Axis at American Summer Camps,

1890–1950

A B I G A I L A . V A N S LY C K

Summer camps may seem like an odd place to study the relationship
between technology and culture. After all, organized camps—the industry’s
term for overnight camps attended by children without their parents—
were initially established in the 1880s and 1890s as antidotes to overcivi-
lization, a condition exacerbated by the technologies of comfort and con-
venience that had blossomed in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Although camps with distinct goals sprang up in subsequent decades, most
sought to develop in campers both the manual skills and the habit of hard
work that would allow them to sever their dependence on modern tech-
nology and regain the self-reliance of their forefathers. Touched by the anti-
quarian impulse that also informed the Arts and Crafts movement and
other late Victorian enthusiasms that T. J. Jackson Lears has identified with
antimodernism, organized camping maintained a back-to-basics disdain
for technology throughout much of the twentieth century. Specialized
camps have emerged in recent decades to give campers intensive exposure
to technology, but for many camp organizers the phrase “computer camp”
remains an oxymoron.1

Dr. Van Slyck is Dayton Associate Professor of Art History at Connecticut College. She is
the author of Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (Chicago,
1995) and is currently working on a book manuscript titled A Manufactured Wilderness:
Interpreting the Cultural Landscape of American Summer Camps, 1890–1960. She thanks
Joy Parr and the two Technology and Culture reviewers for their careful reading of and
thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.
©2002 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/02/4304-0002$8.00

1. For an overview of the range of camp types instituted in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, see Eleanor Eells, History of Organized Camping: The First 100
Years (Martinsville, Ind., 1986), chaps. 2 and 3. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace:
Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York,
1981), esp. chaps. 2 and 4.

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Yet if camp organizers deliberately decided not to adopt all of the tech-
nological innovations available to them (a culturally significant act in its
own right), they did use technology selectively, especially in connection
with food preparation. Well into the 1930s (and particularly during mal-
nutrition scares in the 1910s), rebuilding the health of urban-dwelling chil-
dren was one of the explicit benefits of the camp experience, and most
camps prided themselves on their ample, wholesome food. The challenge of
providing three meals a day for a small army of campers was substantial,
prompting many summer camps to make a dining hall with a properly
equipped kitchen the first permanent building to grace the camp property.
From this perspective, then, it is no more strange for summer camps to
employ available kitchen technologies than it would be for colleges, hospi-
tals, or prisons to do so.2
A great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to kitchen technolo-
gies in private dwellings, but we know very little about the growing numbers
of kitchens that operated outside the home in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Molly Berger has considered the physical evolution of
hotel kitchens, demonstrating their role in creating new standards of refine-
ment by insulating genteel diners from the sounds and smells associated with
food preparation. Harvey Levenstein and Dolores Hayden have investigated
aspects of public kitchens established at the end of the nineteenth century,
first in Boston and later in other cities (especially in connection with social
settlements such as Chicago’s Hull House), to reform the eating habits of the
working poor. These not only provided cheap and nutritious meals (at least
according to contemporary scientific standards), but cooking took place in
open view in order to encourage customers to emulate slow-cooking tech-
niques at home. But where neither the quality of the food nor the character
of the dining experience was the primary focus, in institutions in which
meals were simply an infrastructural adjunct to educational, medical, penal,
or religious activities, kitchens have largely been ignored. These kitchens
were technological systems as necessary as those that provided light, heat,
and sanitation, responding primarily to practical imperatives and contribut-
ing little to the larger mission of the institutions they served.3
Or were they? Can institutional kitchens tell us more about cultural pri-
orities than we have assumed they can? Have we missed something by con-

2. On the relationship between summer camps and changing ideas about health, see
Abigail A. Van Slyck, “Housing the Happy Camper,” Minnesota History 58 (summer
2002): 68–83. For more on concerns about malnutrition in the 1910s, see Harvey A.
Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York,
1988), 112–20.
3. Molly W. Berger, “The Magic of Fine Dining: Invisible Technology and the Hotel
Kitchen,” ICON 1 (1995): 106–19. Levenstein, 48–59. Dolores Hayden, The Grand
Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods,
and Cities (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), chap. 8.

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sidering the kitchen in isolation from the other spaces and activities
involved in producing and consuming meals—social rituals brimming with
cultural meaning? Have we perhaps hampered our ability to interpret insti-
tutional kitchens by focusing too closely on what happens within their four
walls? Architectural historians have been guilty of such lapses, even when
studying domestic kitchens, as Elizabeth C. Cromley has pointed out. Her
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concept of “the food axis,” the system of activity arenas devoted to food
2002 storage, meal preparation, eating, and cleanup, is a very useful reminder to
VOL. 43
look beyond the walls of the kitchen and to take seriously the interconnec-
tions between seemingly disparate alimentary tasks.4
In the case of American summer camps, a consideration of the entire
food axis will help us understand the relationship between developments in
kitchen technologies and changes in socially constructed ideas about child-
hood. Meals were key moments for camper socialization. Strictly observed
mealtimes gave a clear and consistent structure to each day, and mealtime
order and routine functioned to reconnect campers with civilized human
society after periods of rough-and-tumble activity in the more rustic cor-
ners of camp. These were ritual occasions, both in the sense that they
tended to follow predictable patterns in which each participant had a well-
defined role and in the sense that those patterns were intended to commu-
nicate important messages about the larger meaning of camp life. Meal-
times were moments when the camp community acted out for itself and
others its own sense of its larger mission.
An examination of the food axis at summer camps will also help us
understand something about camps that we cannot learn from written
sources alone. Mealtime practices took on heightened importance in the
late nineteenth century and beyond, as eating became (in historian John
Kasson’s words) “the most exquisite social test” of genteel behavior.5
Despite the apparent contradiction of learning these behaviors in a rustic
setting, meals shine a bright light on a camp’s commitment to gentility and
to class-inflected notions of gender roles. Especially in the early years of the
camp movement, from about 1880 into the 1920s, differences in mealtime
rituals reveal a range of attitudes that are almost invisible in written state-
ments about the importance of camping for boys. That those differences
had begun to disappear by the 1930s is undoubtedly the result of the grow-
ing professionalization of camp directing in the period; indeed, their dis-
appearance helps identify the moment when professionals redefined the
camp’s role in the process of socialization. Once understood to be bridges
between childhood and the world of adults, American summer camps at
first sought to instill self-reliance and a sense of satisfaction at a job well

4. Elizabeth C. Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis: Houses, Tools, Modes of

Analysis,” Material History Review 44 (fall 1996): 8–22.
5. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban
America (New York, 1990), 182.

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done by maximizing camper involvement in food preparation while mini-

mizing the use of cooking technology. But by midcentury they used a full
range of kitchen technologies to distance campers from routine meal
preparation, ultimately reinforcing the boundary between the realms in
which adults worked and those in which children played.

Manliness and the Beginnings of North American

Summer Camps

First introduced to the North American landscape in the last quarter of

the nineteenth century, summer camps for children were initially estab-
lished in response to a cluster of late-Victorian concerns about child rear-
ing, especially as it affected boys. Camps were part of a back-to-nature
trend that had been developing in Anglo-American culture since midcen-
tury. In this respect they are comparable to urban parks, residential sub-
urbs, resort hotels, and national parks—all institutions aimed at providing
respite from the moral and physical degradation of urban life, evils to
which women and children were particularly prone. In the early twentieth
century, the importance of getting children out of the city was reinforced
by new scientific theories. The germ theory of disease, for instance, height-
ened awareness of urban crowding as a menace to physical health, while
child psychology hinted at the city’s dire threat to the child’s mental well-
being. The recapitulation theory advanced by psychologist G. Stanley Hall
held that each child repeated (or recapitulated) the evolution of the human
race from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Not only were chil-
dren closer to nature than their parents, but thrusting them too soon into
modern urban civilization could derail their normal development.6
In the view of Hall and his contemporaries, these theories had great
import for boys, whose incipient manhood seemed particularly threatened
by what came to be called “overcivilization.” Scientists believed the male
body was more prone than the female to neurasthenia, a neurological ill-
ness discovered by physician George M. Beard and defined by him in 1881
as “a lack of nervous force” caused by modern civilization. More generally,
overcivilization was linked to effeminacy and racial decadence, prompting
intellectuals throughout Europe and Anglo-America to worry about the
“emasculating tendencies of excessive civilization.” As historian Gail

6. For turn-of-the-century ideas about nature’s physical and social benefits for
urban children, see Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in
America (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 61–68. Hall is credited with coining the term “ado-
lescence,” which is also the title of his best known work, Adolescence: Its Psychology and
Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2
vols. (New York, 1904). See also Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: Psychologist as Prophet
(Chicago, 1972), and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of
Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995), chap. 3.

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Bederman has demonstrated, these anxieties prompted a wholesale shift in

middle-class ideals of male identity. While Victorian culture had valued
high-minded self-restraint, the chief quality in what it called manliness,
middle-class men at the end of the nineteenth century came to consider
such conduct effeminate and sought to temper it with more aggressive
behaviors associated with masculinity, itself a new term in the late-Vic-
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torian period.7
2002 If anxieties about overcivilization challenged Victorian notions of man-
VOL. 43
liness, they also called into question the value of institutions established to
civilize young boys. The feminized home and Victorian motherhood were
favorite targets for censure in the late nineteenth century. Middle-class men
who might once have praised doting mothers for their maternal dedication
increasingly accused them of coddling their sons and preventing them from
developing the self-reliance that characterized earlier generations. Some
charged that such mothering practices undermined military preparedness.
The Boy Scouts, one of the first youth organizations to endorse summer
camps in the United States, had been established in England in 1908 by
Robert Baden-Powell, who was motivated in large part by the poor quality
of soldiering he had encountered during the Boer War. While Baden-Powell
blamed the ignorance of working-class home life, his American contempo-
raries made it clear that they considered middle-class mothers equally
guilty of undermining robust manhood. G. Stanley Hall was among them.
In a 1908 article titled “Feminization in School and Home,” Hall stated
flatly that “the callow fledgling in the pin-feather stage of the earliest ’teens
whom the lady teacher and the fond mother can truly call a perfect gentle-
man has something the matter with him.” 8
Such concerns were exacerbated by the unprecedented amount of
leisure time available in the late nineteenth century, especially during the
long summer vacation, an interval characterized by Henry W. Gibson as “a
period of moral deterioration with most boys.” According to Gibson, who
directed the Young Men’s Christian Association’s (YMCA) Camp Becket in
western Massachusetts between 1903 and 1927, camps offered a healthy
alternative for “literally thousands of boys who have heretofore wasted the
glorious summer time loafing on the city streets, or as disastrously at sum-

7. On the introduction of the term “overcivilization,” see E. Anthony Rotundo,

American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern
Era (New York, 1993), 251–55. George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes
and Consequences (New York, 1881). On the relationship between neurasthenia and
manliness, and on turn-of-the-century ideas about masculinity, see Bederman, 84–88,
16–23.
8. On the critique of mothering and the crisis in masculinity, see David I. Macleod,
Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and their Forerunners,
1870–1920 (Madison, Wisc., 1983), 48, 268. For a discussion of Baden-Powell’s response
to the Boer War, see Macleod, 136–41. G. Stanley Hall, “Feminization in School and
Home,” World’s Work 16 (May 1908): 10240.

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mer hotels or amusement places.” Given that men often visited their sum-
mering families only for brief intervals during the season, this criticism of
summer hotels is linked to anxieties about too much female influence.9
For many Americans, the solution lay in instituting a new kind of sum-
mer experience for the boy, one that would remove him from the feminized
home for some period of time and send him out into nature in the com-
pany of the right kind of man. There could be some difference of opinion
about the attributes of the ideal role model: the YMCA emphasized reli-
gious feeling, for instance, while many private camps placed greater store in
athletic prowess or knowledge of the out-of-doors. What was beyond dis-
pute was the close connection between a natural setting and the fostering
of a new mode of manliness. American clergyman and author Edward
Everett Hale made this connection explicit when he stated that “A boy must
learn to sleep under the open sky and to tramp ten miles through the rain
if he wants to be strong. He must learn what sort of men it was who made
America, and he must not get into this fuss and flurry of our American civ-
ilization and think that patent leather shoes and white kid gloves are neces-
sary for the salvation of his life.” Although camps for girls existed in the
early twentieth century, the summer camp as an institution was called into
being by modern anxieties about boys, and their needs dominated the pub-
lic discussion about the form and role of the summer camp.10

The Food Axis at Early Boys’ Camps

If early converts to the cause of camping espoused a common faith in

the benefits of bringing boys into contact with nature, there was little con-
sensus on what form the camp landscape should take. As Barksdale May-
nard has demonstrated, some of the earliest private camps for boys—Camp
Chocorua (established in 1881), Camp Asquam (established in 1885 as
Camp Harvard and renamed in 1887), and Camp Pasquaney (established
in 1895), all in New Hampshire—housed campers and camp activities in
rustic lodges, among them freestanding dining pavilions. Fitted out with
deep piazzas supported by posts formed of tree trunks, these lodges drew
heavily on the Picturesque aesthetic tradition that emerged in England in
the eighteenth century. Celebrating the quaint over the grand, the rustic
over the polished, and the irregular over the symmetrical, the Picturesque
was initially associated with rural retreats of the aristocracy, then with nine-
teenth-century suburbs and other sites aimed at enhancing middle-class
enjoyment of nature. At early summer camps Picturesque design principles
not only informed the character of individual buildings but also affected
the overall layout of the camp, with pavilions scattered throughout the

9. Henry W. Gibson, Camping for Boys (New York, 1913), 7, 9.

10. Hale is quoted in Gibson, Camping for Boys, 38.

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wooded site in an irregular arrangement designed to complement the nat-

ural surroundings.11
Despite such formal similarities, early private camps differed sharply in
the degree of primitiveness to which they subjected campers, generating a
debate that became particularly heated in connection with mealtime prac-
tices. At one extreme was Camp Chocorua, where founder Ernest B. Balch
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insisted that boys do all the cooking and cleaning themselves. Balch
2002 employed no professional chef, and prided himself on the fact that only tin
VOL. 43
dishes were allowed in camp. In contrast, Asquam and Pasquaney both
employed professional cooks and used fine dinnerware. Pasquaney’s
founder, Edward S. Wilson, scoffed at the idea of “cooking one’s own food
(poor stuff at that!) and eating off of tin with jack knife and a two-pronged
fork or no fork at all!” He advised a prospective counselor to impress upon
parents that at Pasquaney “we have first class food and plenty of it and well
prepared by a professional man-cook whom I pay $2.00 a day. We also eat
off of China, and use silver-plated knives, forks, and spoons!” Wilson’s atten-
tion to the details of table settings underlines his concern with maintaining
new standards of gentility emerging in the late nineteenth century. As John
Kasson has pointed out, the two-tined fork (its sharp prongs made of iron)
and the associated practice of using a knife to put food in one’s mouth had
both been commonplace in the early part of the nineteenth century, but as
early as the 1830s they began to be seen as “marks of rusticity and vulgarity.”
By the end of the century they had fallen out of favor completely, and silver-
plated flatware “had gone from being a luxury associated with the nobility
to a ubiquitous necessity among the middle class.” While Balch may have
used tin plates to evoke an old-fashioned rusticity—a quality that many
adherents of the new manliness considered a healthy antidote to overcivi-
lization—for Wilson these older practices could not be separated from their
vulgar connotations and so were unacceptable, even at camp.12
Unlike these elite camping endeavors, many early YMCA and Boy Scout
camps eschewed Picturesque aesthetics and settled instead on the military
encampment as the most appropriate model for camp life, allowing boys to
experience an all-male environment that would counteract the influence of
the feminized home. At YMCA Camp Becket, for instance, campers slept in
tents pitched around a square parade ground, which served as the stage for
a wide range of military rituals that structured the daily routine: reveille,
the parading of the colors, morning inspection, calisthenics, taps. In some
camps the military theme was reinforced in other ways, often with camp
uniforms modeled on military drab.13

11. W. Barksdale Maynard, “‘An Ideal Life in the Woods for Boys’: Architecture and
Culture in the Earliest Summer Camps,” Winterthur Portfolio 34 (spring 1999): 3–29.
12. Wilson is quoted in Maynard, 20–21. Kasson (n. 5 above), 189–91.
13. For the early history of Camp Becket, see Camp Becket In-the-Berkshires, 1903–
1953 (Boston, 1953). Images of the camp are used throughout Gibson, Camping for Boys.

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Military trappings also had a practical appeal for these relatively inex-
pensive YMCA and Boy Scout camps, many of which were located initially
on borrowed land. Sitting lightly on the land, such camps could be dis-
mantled easily at the end of the season and reestablished elsewhere the next
year, depending on the size of the camp population and the generosity of
the camp benefactors. Camp Dudley, a YMCA camp organized by the New-
burgh, New York, YMCA, is a case in point. First situated on Orange Lake,
in 1885, the camp moved the very next summer to a better site on Lake
Wawayanda in New Jersey, where it remained for five years. In 1891 it
moved to Lake Champlain, and relocated to another site on the same lake
in 1898. Under the circumstances, only a minimal investment in infra-
structure or buildings made sense.14
Camps that catered to middle-class boys diverged considerably in their
facilities for cooking and eating. In some, meal preparation took place in
and around cooking and dining tents. Both facilities feature prominently in
an article on camp planning published in 1902 by Edgar M. Robinson, the
YMCA’s International Boys’ Work Secretary, who based his advice on the
experience of a number of successful YMCA camp leaders. As described by
Robinson, the cooking enclosure was a rudimentary affair. Although Rob-
inson stated that “a shed of some kind is generally preferable to a tent for
kitchen purposes,” he went on to admit that “a few pieces of old canvas will
serve as a roof, while the sides of the kitchen are frequently open.” The tech-
nologies of cooking associated with this enclosure also varied greatly. At
many camps (including Camp Dudley; see fig. 1), cooking was accom-
plished over an open fire with cooking vessels supported on “six or eight
bars of iron about four or five feet in length, either solid or made from old
pipe . . . supported about eight or ten inches from the ground on stones.” At
other YMCA camps iron stoves and ranges were employed, although
Robinson downplayed their usefulness, noting that they were “difficult and
expensive to transport.” His enthusiasm for portable baker’s ovens, however,
was unqualified. Made of galvanized sheet iron, they were light and easily
transported, especially after their cast-iron fireboxes, designed for burning
coal, were replaced by sheet-iron fireboxes for burning wood. Another
advantage for YMCA camps (whose operating expenses at this date were no
more than a dollar per day per camper) was the low cost of these ovens,
which could be bought secondhand at bakeries or stove shops.15
In other YMCA camps meals were taken in permanent dining pavilions,

14. R. P. Kaighn, “Camp Dudley,” Association Boys 4 (June 1905): 109–11.

15. Edgar M. Robinson, “Association Boys’ Camps,” Association Boys 1 (June 1902):
85, 92. Operating expenses for YMCA camps were published in “Association Boys’
Camps Reported in 1901,” Association Boys 1 (June 1902): 122–23. Of the sixty-one
camps that included information on their operating costs, only one, in Evanston, Illinois,
spent a dollar per camper per day, while another, in Paris, Illinois, spent only twenty
cents per camper per day.

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FIG. 1 Cook tent, Camp Dudley, New York, circa 1895. (Kautz Family YMCA
Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota.)

although these seem to have been relatively rare in the early years of the
century. One was built at Camp Becket in 1905 (fig. 2), but only because the
camp held title to its site, which had been “presented by a man who saw the
possibilities of the camp in the development of character in boys.” Housing
both an open-sided dining room and an enclosed living room with a big
stone fireplace, this “Mountain Lodge” (as Henry W. Gibson called it) used
rustic design motifs reminiscent of the private retreats built in the Adiron-
dacks in the 1880s. Nonetheless, its location—closing in the fourth side of
the parade ground like a military mess hall—allowed it to contribute to the
military theme around which the camp was organized.16
Whether in cook tents or enclosed kitchens attached to dining pavil-
ions, meals were typically prepared by a single cook assisted by campers. Al-
though Robinson reported that “many of the small camps actually thrive
on the management of amateur cooks,” larger camps hired professional
cooks. Another YMCA commentator characterized the professional camp
cook as “an aristocrat who must be treated with respect, for whom water
must be pumped, errands run, and wood carried . . . a tyrant subject to no
one,” which suggests the authority such men wielded. Camp cooks came
from a variety of backgrounds—lumber camps, ships, hotels, restaurants.
Boarding schools were another source; according to a 1910 brochure, cook-
ing at Camp Becket was under the direction of James Allston, former chef
at St. Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut.17

16. Henry W. Gibson, “Camps Durrell and Becket,” Association Boys 5 (June 1906):
118.
17. Robinson, “Association Boys’ Camps,” 93. Frank H. Streightoff, “Summer Camps,”

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FIG. 2 Exterior view of dining pavilion, Camp Becket, Massachusetts, built in

1905. (Camp Becket for Boys [n.p., 1910], brochure, 4, Kautz Family YMCA
Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota.)

Even at camps that employed the services of a professional cook, mid-

dle-class campers were deeply involved in routine meal preparation.
Kitchen chores were often assigned to small squads of campers on a rotat-
ing basis, although at many camps every camper was required to wash his
own dishes after each meal. At mealtime, campers lined up, plates in hand,
as their fellow campers dished out food from a makeshift serving table or
from the benches in the dining tent (fig. 3). After meals, campers formed
up again to proceed through the dish-washing line, in which each camper
scraped, washed, rinsed, and dried his own dishes. Early camp literature
played up this aspect of camp life with pictures of boys cheerfully pumping
water, peeling potatoes, serving food, washing dishes. The boundary
between work and play was intentionally blurred at early boys’ camps, both
in terms of who did the work and in terms of the spatial distinction
between the areas used for cooking and eating. Food preparation was sim-
ply an integral—and highly visible—part of camp life.18
On one level, this intimate involvement of male campers with food
preparation—work conventionally assigned to women—seems at odds
with the larger mission of the camping movement to forge a more virile

Association Boys 4 (June 1905): 131–32. Camp Becket for Boys (n.p., 1910), brochure, 3,
Kautz Family YMCA Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota.
18. The best sources for images of male campers involved in food preparation are arti-
cles published in Association Boys (a YMCA publication); see, for example, Gibson,
“Camps Durrell and Becket,” 113–27, and Edgar M. Robinson, “The Experimental Wood-
craft Camp,” Association Boys 9 (June 1910): 116–29. Comparable images for girls are to
be found throughout Campward Ho! A Manual for Girl Scout Camps (New York, 1920).

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FIG. 3 Dining tent, Boy Scout encampment, Hunter’s Island, New York, 1912.
(Library of Congress.)

mode of manhood. At another level, however, food preparation in certain

nondomestic settings was becoming increasingly associated with middle-
class, white men. Not only were restaurant and hotel kitchens increasingly
the domain of white, male professionals—typically identified as chefs,
avoiding the less prestigious, racially coded term “cook”—but images of
men cooking over an open fire dominated depictions of all-male sociabil-
ity in the late nineteenth century. In an 1863 Currier and Ives print (fig. 4),
guides cook the day’s catch while a fisherman pours himself a drink and
surveys their activities. The scene celebrates a virile manliness in the ab-
sence of women and their domestic influence, underlining the self-suffi-
ciency of these men and highlighting their ability to cope with the ele-
ments—even, in the case of the open fire, to command them. Equally
important, the practice of giving campers kitchen duties on a rotating basis
had obvious parallels with the army’s practice of assigning soldiers KP
(“kitchen police”) duty, a term that became common in the years before
World War I. At YMCA Camp Durrell in 1906 the adult in charge of this
squad was even known as “the officer of the day.” By paralleling the prac-
tices of the quintessential all-male environment, this system of organizing
the labor of food preparation remained perfectly consistent with the larger
mission of early boys’ camps.19

19. On the gendered, racial hierarchy of professional kitchens, see Levenstein (n. 2
above), 14–15. Of course, the associations between manliness and cooking over an open
fire continue in backyard cookouts, where Dad often “mans” the barbecue. Gibson,
“Camps Durrell and Becket,” 116.

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FIG. 4 Camping in the Woods: “A Good Time Coming,” Currier and Ives, after
a painting by A. F. Tait, 1863. (Courtesy of the Adirondack Museum, Blue
Mountain Lake, New York.)

When it came time to consume the meal, however, YMCA camps ini-
tially embraced a degree of gentility at odds with the metaphors of mas-
culinity that dominated food preparation and even at odds with their own
published statements. In a 1910 brochure for Camp Becket, for instance,
prospective campers were warned that they “must not expect to find the
dainties of the home table” at camp. Yet in Camping for Boys, published in
1913, Henry W. Gibson called upon his decade of experience as director of
Camp Becket when he suggested that each camper be provided with a ful-
some range of specialized dinnerware: “a large plate of the deep soup pat-
tern, cereal bowl not too large, a saucer for sauce and dessert, a cup, knife,
fork, table spoon, and tea spoon.” Although by no means as extensive as a
formal dinner setting (Kasson notes, for instance, that by 1880 Reed and
Barton offered as many as ten different kinds of knives, twelve kinds of
forks, and twenty different spoons in each of over a dozen flatware pat-
terns), this setting suggests that camp food would achieve a degree of elab-
oration—with sauces and desserts—that went well beyond the require-
ments for good health. With its choice of spoons, it also eschewed the
“vulgarity” associated with the antiquated practice of eating only with the
knife and two-pronged fork, and might be considered the minimum
needed to sustain newer middle-class standards of gentility. Likewise
Gibson’s description of the camp table—“set with white oil cloth, white
enamelled [sic] dishes, both serving and individual, with decorations of
ferns, wild flowers or blossoms”—may have acknowledged and even cele-

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brated the rusticity of the setting, but it also actively reinforced the impor-
tance of maintaining the material trappings of mealtime gentility.20
Equally telling is the time and attention that early camp organizers
devoted to the issue of table manners. In his summary of the best practices
at early YMCA camps, Robinson devoted six full paragraphs to “the sys-
tematic arrangement of tables in the dining tent,” dismissing the use of long
OCTOBER
tables with boys on both sides as disruptive to mealtime order. In his view,
2002 “to have a large number of boys laughing and joking together at a table,
VOL. 43
while waiters run up and down behind them shouting, ‘Coffee! Coffee!
Coffee! Bread! Bread! Meat! Meat!’ is an unnecessary and unfortunate sys-
tem of serving meals.” Robinson advocated instead a number of smaller
tables—one for each sleeping tent in camp, each presided over by a leader
who would “serve the food in approved family style.” “Under this system,”
Robinson assured his readers, “decency and order of eating is [sic] pre-
served and the boys are not fed like animals at a trough.” Gibson was
equally concerned with gentle mealtime behavior, declaring that “rough-
house table manners are a disgrace to a camp even as small as six boys.” 21
Yet Robinson’s condemnation of long tables confirms their use at those
camps that modeled the dining experience more closely on the military
mess, inspired perhaps by the actual encampments of the Great War. Camp
Ranachqua, a Boy Scout Camp near Narrowsburg, New York, is a case in
point. There the mess hall was open on three sides, with the fireplace at the
other end marking the location of an enclosed kitchen. Although less elab-
orately ornamented than the dining pavilion at Camp Becket, this open-air
dining room, its perimeter marked by rustic railings and its solid roof sup-
ported by unhewn timbers, shared many features with that earlier building
(fig. 5). Despite the similarities, however, Ranachqua’s mess hall functioned
very differently, with military analogies now structuring mealtime rituals as
well as food preparation and cleanup. Of course, the very term “mess hall”
was borrowed directly from the army; so too was the arrangement of the
dining space itself, with long narrow tables aligned with the kitchen wall.
The resulting seating arrangement facilitated food delivery by presorting
campers into long queues that would lead to the serving table or serving
window near the kitchen. A table for leaders near the kitchen confirms that
the family-style dining advocated by Robinson was not practiced at Camp
Ranachqua.
While these military overtones were nominally in keeping with camp
rhetoric, they held the potential to change the tone of camp life in impor-
tant ways. By imitating military order at mealtime, camps sought not only
to impose stricter control over camper behavior but also to achieve that

20. Camp Becket for Boys, 3. Gibson, Camping for Boys (n. 9 above), 52. Kasson (n. 5
above), 189.
21. Robinson, “Association Boys’ Camps” (n. 15 above), 86–87. Gibson, Camping for
Boys, 52.

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FIG. 5 Interior view of the mess hall, Camp Ranachqua, New York, 1919.
(Library of Congress.)

control through the imposition of external regulations rather than the

development of the camper’s internal sense of propriety. At the same time,
by exposing campers to environments designed to coordinate the move-
ments of a large number of people, the mess hall also implicitly introduced
campers to the kind of rationalization that increasingly shaped the work
lives of American men, in both factories and offices. In these mess halls,
boys were encouraged to emulate adult males, but their activities were
increasingly associated with routine work rather than with the daring and
heroism of the military scouts whose example had inspired Baden-Powell
and his contemporaries. To the extent that such arrangements treated the
bodies of campers as interchangeable components of a large and efficient
food delivery mechanism, they also undermined another important goal of
the early camp movement, namely, to give campers a respite from “the
indoor routine of city life.” 22
In short, the food axis was a locus of struggle in these early years of or-
ganized camping, a site where camp organizers tried to reconcile their own
conflicting notions about camp life. On one hand, they valued the chance to
involve boys in food preparation, and embraced military practice as creating
an appropriately manly setting in which to teach boys to do for themselves.
On the other hand, they were often unwilling to abandon the mealtime gen-
tility that was a defining characteristic of middle-class respectability. Put

22. For Baden-Powell’s interest in turning military scouting into a game for boys, see
Macleod (n. 8 above), 133–36. The quote is from Walter M. Wood, “Objectives in Out-
ings and Camps for Boys,” Association Boys 6 (June 1907): 113.

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another way, the food axis was the site where camp organizers tried to nego-
tiate the fine line between the civilized behavior that they still valued and the
overcivilization that they had come to see as a threat to vital manliness.

The Girl Scouts Respond

OCTOBER
The extent to which the camping experience in general and the food
2002
axis in particular depended upon and reinforced notions about gender
VOL. 43 becomes even clearer when we consider the published advice regarding
meal preparation at girls’ camps. The first of these camps were established
around 1900, and like the first boys’ camps they were private institutions
that catered to the offspring of elite families. Among the earliest were Camp
Kehonka in New Hampshire, founded in 1902 by Laura Mattoon, and the
Wyonegonic Camps in Bridgton, Maine, founded in the same year by C. E.
Cobb. By 1910, forty-one private camps for girls were in operation, and
were soon joined by camps associated with the Girl Scouts and the Camp
Fire Girls, youth organizations serving middle-class girls. By 1925 there
were some three hundred Girl Scout camps in the United States.23
On the surface, these camps had a great deal in common with boys’
camps. Certainly they shared the notion that time away from the comforts
of home helped build a hardy self-reliance in growing campers. But camp-
ing for girls was more controversial. G. Stanley Hall, whose recapitulation
theory had provided a scientific rationale for boys’ camps, was much less
sanguine about encouraging girls to develop the same type of self-suffi-
ciency. Haunted by the same concerns that had prompted Theodore Roose-
velt to equate the rise of the New Woman with the falling birthrate and so-
called race suicide, he expressed dismay at what he saw as “the new love of
freedom which women have lately felt,” which, he complained, “inclines a
girl to abandon the home for the office.” Nor were the directors of boys’
camps always sympathetic to the cause. Indeed, when the Camp Directors
Association of America was founded in 1910, it barred women from mem-
bership. The fact that a rival group, the National Association of Directors of
Girls’ Private Camps—officially established in 1916—welcomed both men
and women suggests that the difference between the groups had as much to
do with the sex of the campers as with the sex of the camp directors
involved.24
Yet even those who championed camping for girls were not interested
in encouraging female campers to act like boys. To be sure, girls’ youth
organizations disliked conventional definitions of femininity; in Camp Fire

23. For early girls’ camps, see Eells (n. 1 above), 39–42, 68–69.
24. Hall, Adolescence (n. 6 above), 2:619. On organizations for camp directors, see
Eells, 85–92. Roosevelt voiced his concern about race suicide in “National Life and
Character,” in American Ideals and Other Essays, Social and Political (New York, 1897).
These ideas are discussed at length in Bederman (n. 6 above), 200–206.

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Girl novels, women of the older generation were portrayed as helpless and
sometimes hysterical. But both the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls still
upheld the importance of gender differentiation, and continued to see mar-
riage and motherhood as each girl’s ultimate goal. This commitment to
policing the line between male and female behavior could manifest itself in
even the smallest details. The Camp Fire Girls, for instance, encouraged
members to dress in an interpretation of Native American garb, but for-
bade them to wear upright feathers in their head bands, a practice associ-
ated exclusively with Indian braves. Such prohibitions may seem inconse-
quential, but as Gail Bederman has pointed out, gender differentiation and
civilization were closely interconnected. In the early part of the century, to
give up on the former inevitably meant the demise of the latter.25
If girls’ camps were required to meet different ends than boys’ camps,
those differences were particularly acute with regard to food preparation
and cleanup, tasks assigned to women in the domestic sphere. The advice
offered in Campward Ho!, a Girl Scout camping manual published in 1920,
made it clear that female campers—like their male counterparts—should
be intimately involved in food preparation at camp. The unidentified
author’s confident assertion that it is possible to feed one hundred and fifty
to two hundred people “with only one cook and a squad of Scouts,” was
reinforced with numerous images of uniformed girls peeling potatoes,
pumping water, and engaging in other cooking chores. At the same time,
the mess hall plan reproduced in the manual confirms the appeal of mili-
tary metaphors and military order at Girl Scout camp—not surprising,
perhaps, given the military overtones of the British Boy Scouts, which
spawned both the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts (the American
version of the British Girl Guides).26
Yet Campward Ho! also made it clear that Girl Scout camps were not to
mimic every aspect of boys’ camps. The author took particular exception to
the dish-washing line, in which each camper washed, rinsed, dried, and
stored her own dishes. Such a system may have been easy, but it also broke
“the rules being taught to Scouts as to the proper way of washing dishes:
namely, to wash glass first, silver next, change the water and wash saucers,

25. For a fictional contrast of an able Camp Fire Girl and her hysterical mother, see
Julianne DeVries, The Campfire Girls as Detectives (Cleveland, 1933), 13–20. For rules
regarding Camp Fire Girl costume, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven,
1998), 113. On the relationship between civilization and gender differentiation, see
Bederman, 25.
26. Campward Ho! (n. 18 above), 37. On militarism in British scouting, see J. O.
Springhall, “The Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism in Relation to British Youth Move-
ments, 1908–1930,” International Review of Social History 16 (1971): 125–58. See also
Allen Warren, “Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in
Great Britain, 1890–1920,” English Historical Review 101 (1986): 376–98, and Springhall’s
response, “Baden-Powell and the Scout Movement before 1920: Citizen Training or
Soldiers for the Future?” English Historical Review 102 (1987): 934–42.

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cups, plates and so forth.” Not only was the dish-washing line unsanitary,
but it offended the Girl Scouts’ sense of the proper division of labor: “No
mother would think of having each member of the family stack her dishes,
take them to the sink, wash and wipe them and put them away. This
method would be considered most inefficient and confusing.” Clearly, the
Girl Scout leadership counted on the camp program to instill domestic
OCTOBER
habits that they expected girls to apply eventually in their own homes.27
2002 Such invocations of mother as the ultimate authority in domestic mat-
VOL. 43
ters suggest that the Girl Scouts embraced the various aspects of meal
preparation as particularly female skills. Indeed, the amount of attention
the manual devoted to the layout and equipment of the mess hall kitchen
was unprecedented in camping literature and might be interpreted as an
attempt to reinforce claims to female control over the kitchen. In this con-
text, the invocation of efficiency is equally telling. On one hand, it serves as
a reminder that this early phase of camping for girls coincided with the loss
of live-in servants in middle-class households and with attempts by a new
breed of female efficiency experts (chief among them Lillian Gilbreth and
Christine Frederick) to teach middle-class housewives to apply principles
of scientific management to the domestic sphere. The new expectation that
middle-class women would be more directly involved in every aspect of
household labor meant that camp activities could no longer be considered
generic exercises in usefulness. On the other hand, it is important to
remember that the enthusiasm for efficiency had an ideological compo-
nent. As Dolores Hayden has argued, the efficient application of so-called
laborsaving technologies helped sustain conservative views of home life
and women’s domestic labor by undermining earlier attempts at collective
housekeeping.28
Paralleling changes taking place in middle-class homes, laborsaving
technologies dominate the mess hall kitchen in Campward Ho! Gone is any
reference to cooking over an open fire. While an integral wood shed sug-
gests that the fuel source remained the same, the text itself emphasized the
importance of a full-size range, noting that “the kitchen should be equip-
ped with a good stove having ovens and hot water tank and be large enough
to admit of holding big boilers and kettles.” The manual also favored
installing a Standard Oil heater and boiler to provide piped hot water,
although it noted that such arrangements were not within the reach of
most camps, as they required “a tank and power of some kind to pump up
the water.” Yet the kitchen plan published in Campward Ho! seems almost
untouched by the sort of rationalization of space advocated by Frederick
and other efficiency experts (fig. 6). Stove, sink, and serving window form

27. Campward Ho!, 45.

28. Christine Frederick’s influential domestic advice manual, Household Engineering:
Scientific Management in the Home (Chicago, 1920), was published in the same year as
Campward Ho! Hayden (n. 3 above), 264–65.

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FIG. 6 Mess hall plan for a camp of 150 to 200 girls, 1920. (Campward Ho! A
Manual for Girl Scout Camps [New York, 1920], 35. Used by permission of the
Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.)

a work triangle of sorts, but the inefficiency of the rest of the kitchen—par-
ticularly the way the office limits ready access to the other side of the
stove—suggests that the triangle was something of a fluke. In other words,
Campward Ho! seems to have evoked the discourse of efficiency for rhetor-
ical purposes rather than in a genuine effort to rationalize the functioning
of the camp kitchen.29
In short, ideas about gender had an important influence on campers’
involvement with routine meal preparation at early summer camps. Al-
though campers of both sexes were involved in similar kitchen duties, camp
organizers accepted and even embraced different roles for men and women.
They encouraged boys and girls to complete their kitchen tasks in different

29. Campward Ho!, 34–36.

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and (in their view) gender-appropriate ways and sought to imbue them
with distinct and (they felt) gender-appropriate meanings. For boys, wash-
ing dishes at camp was something of a rite of passage, an unpleasant job
that they were expected to take on cheerfully in order to demonstrate their
solidarity with the group. But like the soldiers whose KP chores they emu-
lated, male campers viewed their domestic servitude as a temporary state to
OCTOBER
be abandoned once they returned to their normal existence. In contrast,
2002 organizations like the Girl Scouts understood that meal preparation would
VOL. 43
itself become the normal existence for the girls who attended their camps.
Although the tasks themselves were not so different, the emphasis on order
and method encouraged girls to see these domestic tasks as important in
their own right and as direct practice for the daily routine of adult life.

Camps and New Ideas about Child Development

The summer camp landscape began to change dramatically in the 1930s,

partly in response to demographic shifts, as the age of campers dropped
steadily throughout the twentieth century. Equally important, camp direc-
tors eager to enhance their own professional status began to apply the tenets
of child psychology to camp activities and planning. Particularly influential
was the idea that children naturally experienced distinct developmental
phases that no amount of instruction or discipline could hurry them
through. The result for camp programs was to de-emphasize camp activities
associated with the adult world of work—especially routine food prepara-
tion—and to emphasize activities associated with play and leisure: crafts,
swimming, canoeing, even baseball (once banned from the camp landscape
as too urban an activity). For camp facilities, one result was the unit plan, in
which camps were subdivided into small, age-based residential units, each
pursuing its own age-appropriate activities while all shared the use of the
playing fields, waterfront, craft house, infirmary, and dining lodge.30

30. The idea of child development as a series of inevitable phases had been at the
basis of G. Stanley Hall’s recapitulation theory (first articulated in the 1890s), which held
that each child recapitulated the evolution of the entire species. That theory had had a
great impact on many early camp organizers, who based the rationale for camp on the
need to allow children to be savages—quite literally—as they moved toward civilization.
Perhaps because of this affinity with Hall’s theories, camp professionals were among the
first to reject 1920s behaviorism (which sought to adjust infant behavior to a priori
schedules established by adults) and to reemphasize the close observation of child behav-
ior in order to identify developmental norms (something that came to dominate discus-
sions of parenting in the 1940s, thanks to the work of psychologists Arnold Gesell,
Frances L. Ilg, and Louise B. Ames). For an early discussion of a camp program that
acknowledges these psychological theories, see Hedley S. Dimock and Charles E. Hendry,
Camping and Character: A Camp Experiment in Character Education (New York, 1929).
On the impact of Gesell et al. on parenting practices, see Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the
Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 184–86.

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Thanks to a couple of key publications the unit plan soon became the
industry standard, applied to both boys’ and girls’ camps. The first and
most influential was Park and Recreation Structures, published by the
National Park Service in 1938. This three-volume work documented and
celebrated the material achievements of the New Deal in improving
national and state parks and establishing Recreation Demonstration Areas
(RDAs), sites where submarginal agricultural lands were converted into
public parks. Forty-three RDAs were built by the New Deal, thirty-four of
which included facilities for organized camps. Inspired by Park and Recrea-
tion Structures, the major youth organizations involved in camping pub-
lished their own camp planning manuals soon after the conclusion of
World War II, each of which incorporated the unit plan idea with its cen-
tralized dining lodge (as the camp dining facility was now called).31
These dining lodges were T-shaped buildings, with long, narrow dining
rooms set perpendicular to the kitchen wing (fig. 7). Although related to
the form of earlier mess halls, this arrangement minimized diners’ aware-
ness of the kitchen by several means: reorienting the dining room away
from the kitchen, a change reinforced by relocating fireplaces to the end
walls; introducing windows into the wall on the kitchen side of the dining
room, which enhanced an impression of the dining room as a freestanding
structure; and creating a buffer zone between kitchen and dining areas to
help keep kitchen sounds and smells from intruding upon the dining room.
Distinctions between the dining room and kitchen were underscored by
formal differences. Camp dining rooms retained—and in some cases exag-
gerated—the rustic qualities of the older mess hall. Indeed, camp histories
often celebrate the work of local craftsmen who built the dining hall, hew-
ing the logs for the walls and roof trusses, laying the stone for the fireplace,
and forging the rustic light fixtures. On the other side of the swinging
doors, the camp kitchen was a high-tech environment, planned in great
detail for maximum efficiency. In fact, the kitchen plans of the 1930s and
1940s introduced an emphasis on rationalization that had been lacking in
the kitchen layout published in Campward Ho! in 1920. In a kitchen plan
for an organized campsite in the St. Croix River RDA in Minnesota, a prep
sink is located in easy proximity to both the food storage zone and the
kitchen range. In turn, this cooking area is close to the serving area, while
both cooking and serving areas are close to the dish washing alcove. A
kitchen layout published by the Girl Scouts in 1948 was similarly zoned

31. On the RDAs, see Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and
the National Park Service (Lincoln, Neb., 1998). The key camp-planning manuals of this
era are Albert H. Good, Park and Recreation Structures, vol. 3, Overnight and Organized
Camp Facilities (Washington, D.C., 1938); the Camp Fire Girls’ When You Plan Your
Camp (New York, 1946); the YMCA’s Layout, Building Designs, and Equipment for
Y.M.C.A. Camps (New York, 1946); and Julian Harris Salomon, Camp Site Development
(New York, 1948), for the Girl Scouts.

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2002

VOL. 43

FIG. 7 Dining hall plan and perspective view, commissioned by the Dayton,
Ohio, Girl Scout Council. (Julian Salomon, Camp Site Development [New York,
1948], 50. Used by permission of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.)

into storage, prep, cooking, serving, and dish washing areas, but also pulled
the range and oven away from the wall to create additional work stations—
including one in the corner for a camp dietitian (fig. 8).32

32. A case in point is Kirby Lodge, at Camp Widjiwagan, a YMCA camp on Burnt-
side Lake in northern Minnesota. Completed in 1949, the lodge was the product of pro-
fessional design expertise, but the name most closely associated with the building is that
of Robert Zimmermann, who supervised the log work that gives the dining room its dis-
tinctive character. The lodge was initially designed by an architect from Virginia, identi-
fied in camp records only as Mr. Aldrich, and then redesigned (to reduce the size and cost
of the project) by the St. Paul architectural firm of Ingemann and Bergstedt. Dwight
Ericsson and John Shepard, Widjiwagan: A History from 1929 to 1989 (St. Paul, 1994),
56–59.

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FIG. 8 Kitchen layout for a Girl Scout camp. (Julian Salomon, Camp Site
Development [New York, 1948], 59. Used by permission of the Girl Scouts
of the U.S.A.)

Equipment and materials further distinguished the high-tech camp

kitchen from the rustic dining room. Indeed, in the 1940s camp planning
literature advocated what was essentially a well-equipped commercial
kitchen; the Girl Scouts kitchen plan included a two-compartment deck
oven (no. 7 in the plan) and a two-compartment, walk-in electric refriger-
ator (labeled “Meat” and “Veg.”) with deep-freeze locker (no. 16 in the
plan), while the accompanying text also advocated a reach-in refrigerator in
the kitchen proper. With their hard, reflective surfaces in industrial materi-
als, these fixtures fundamentally altered the visual character of the kitchen,
a development reinforced by the shift to concrete floors (recommended
both for fire protection and easy cleaning).

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2002

VOL. 43

FIG. 9 Mealtime at YMCA Camp Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania, circa 1950.

(Kautz Family YMCA Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota.)

These architectural changes in the dining lodge paralleled other reveal-

ing changes in mealtime practices. Not only was the terminology of the
mess hall abandoned in favor of the gentler dining lodge, but family
metaphors reappeared, replacing military ones at every phase of the meal.
Instead of being treated like interchangeable units slotted into production
lines that delivered food and received dirty dishes, campers now took their
meals family style with their cabin mates. Instead of joining a mass of
campers at long tables, they sat at small round tables of seven or eight, with
counselors standing in loco parentis. Instead of trooping individually
through a cafeteria line, they stayed seated while one of their number
(called the hopper) went to the serving area to pick up platters of food for
the table to share. Being hopper was a rotating job, and also involved
returning dirty dishes for the table to the dish-washing station. Official
photographs confirm subtle changes in dining hall furnishings and the
approved camper behaviors associated with them (fig. 9). The most signif-
icant change is the use of round tables that emphasized the unity of the
cabin family, both by eliminating the head of the table (and the social reg-
imentation that could imply) and by facilitating eye contact among the
entire group.
The rise of the dining lodge also coincided with important changes in
labor organization, especially a tendency to remove campers from routine
food preparation. While Camp Site Development (the 1948 Girl Scout camp

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planning manual) mentioned that campers “may assist with kitchen tasks,”
it also emphasized the importance of restricting them to peripheral zones
designed to limit their involvement with kitchen activities (see fig. 8). One
of these zones was the breezeway near the storage area, where campers
could collect supplies for a cookout or overnight trip “without being con-
stantly in the way of the professional cook.” The other was the serving area
at the other end of the kitchen, where a solid counter prevented campers
from trespassing into the kitchen proper. The high-tech kitchen was now
firmly the province of paid staff, with local youths furnishing the unskilled
labor once provided free of charge by campers. More dependent on pre-
pared foods—even frozen foods stored in the deep-freeze compartment—
routine camp cooking had been stripped of all sense of adventure.33
Cooking undertaken by campers as part of the camp program became
a completely separate activity, which often took place in the unit lodge, a
new type of camp building developed in connection with the unit plan.
Described in Park and Recreation Structures as “the rallying point of a camp
unit,” these buildings were built for the use of twenty-four to thirty-two
campers who lived in the five or six tents or cabins near by. The unit lodges
built in New Deal RDAs comprised two rooms: the lodge proper, an en-
closed area with a massive fireplace and ample fenestration, and a screened-
in kitchen with a masonry camp stove “built integrally with the masonry
chimney.” Architecturally the unit lodge was a miniaturized version of the
older mess hall; in both building types, for instance, the location of the fire-
place and the placement of the kitchen in line with the long axis of the main
room highlighted the presence of the kitchen, which was fitted out with
rudimentary cooking apparatus. Indeed, Albert Good, the author of Park
and Recreation Structures, hinted at a functional similarity between the two
types when he suggested that “experienced camping groups may essay to
cook all their meals in the outdoor kitchen [of the unit lodge].” 34
Despite these formal similarities, however, the unit lodge came to play
a very different role from the mess hall. Even Good had to admit that its
primary function was not to facilitate routine cooking by campers but to let
them “use it on occasion for practice cooking or the novelty of preparing a
meal or two, on their own.” And, indeed, after World War II campers’ cook-
ing rarely supplanted their regular meals. More commonly, postwar camp-
ers supplemented regular meals with snacks like “Some-Mores,” the recipe
for which was published in Girl Scout handbooks as early as 1953.35
Dining lodges built in the late 1930s and 1940s were very different
places from the cooking and dining tents, dining pavilions, and mess halls
that housed the camp food axis earlier in the century. Now dominated by

33. Salomon, 58.

34. Good, 143.
35. Good, 143. Girl Scout Handbook: Intermediate Program (New York, 1953), 280–81.

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technologies common to commercial kitchens, cooking was no longer con-

sidered an appropriate part of the camper’s regular program, and campers
(boys and girls alike) were deliberately removed from the camp kitchen.
Equally important, the dining experience itself was closely modeled on
practices associated with middle-class domesticity, a signal change in an
institutional type initially established as an antidote to the feminized home.
OCTOBER

2002
The Shifting Boundary between Leisure and Work
VOL. 43
Cooking at camp, then, was never a simple, transparent process of sup-
plying ample quantities of wholesome food. As an important component
of the food axis, cooking was an ideologically charged act through which
camp organizers sought to affect the class and gender identities of their
campers. Camp organizers gave serious consideration to every detail of the
mealtime routine, including whether or not to make use of available
kitchen technologies. Such material practices would literally shape the next
generation.
Nor was the growing dependence on cooking technology natural and
inevitable. In the early part of the twentieth century, routine meal prepara-
tion was an integral part of the program at many camps, instilling in
campers an appreciation for hard work and preparing both boys and girls
for their different adult roles. Camp organizers employed available tech-
nologies only selectively, lest laborsaving devices undermine the sense of
self-reliance that the camp experience was meant to foster. Camp directors
introduced technologically advanced industrial kitchens only when meal
preparation had become a service adjunct to the camp’s new focus on
child-centered recreation. Like kitchens in prisons, hospitals, colleges and
other institutions, the midcentury camp kitchen supported the socializa-
tion of campers but no longer played a direct role in that process.
Yet perhaps the very notion of technology as an ideologically neutral
“service adjunct” undervalues its role in cultural institutions. After all, the
industrialized kitchen did not disappear from the camper’s experience of
camp. Although midcentury kitchen plans kept campers behind a serving
counter that prevented them from setting foot in the newly professional-
ized kitchen, these same plans also insured that campers had an almost
panoramic view of this industrialized environment. Everything about it—
its unfamiliar machinery, its reflective surfaces, its personnel—reminded
campers that it was different from the rest of camp. Corralled in this sepa-
rate realm and operated only by adults, midcentury kitchen technology
reinforced in material ways the boundary between childhood leisure and
adult work, and thus contributed to the larger mission of the camp. In the
end, the American summer camp proves to be an unusually rich site for
considering the complex relationship between technology and culture.

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