The Way Childhood Should Be | Post 7 | Maine

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Across the USA

6 min readNov 19, 2015

Ah, summer camp in Maine. I never went. But with over 100 overnight camps lakeside and mountainside across the state, I expected to come across one or two. I just didn’t expect it to be Camp Winnebago on the southwest end of Echo Lake in Fayette. This marks the first time on my virtual cross-country trip that I have clicked by a place I’ve been to in reality. I came here many summers ago to celebrate the wedding of a college friend to Winnebago’s director.

Laura and Andy refer to Winnebago simply as “Camp”, a warm appellation that succinctly captures the traditions, familial bonds, rural setting, and vocational devotion that the place visits upon them — and others. “Camp” spelled with four different letters is “home”.

This kind of affection is not unique to Winnebago. Forbes identifies “Maine camps as the most traditional, sought-after experiences”, and attributes that “mostly [to] Maine’s abundant wilderness and pristine lakes and beaches.” But dear attachments to archetypal sleep-away summer camps are due almost certainly to something else, or at least something that grows from that abundant wilderness and pristine lakes and beaches. Judging from Laura, Andy, Winnebago, and the websites and online guides to Maine camps, it’s the sense of family that makes camp(s) special.

Tour the web in search of an overnight camp for one’s real or imaginary child and you’ll find marketing is very often less about world class sailing, ropes course, and bunk facilities (though there is some of that) and more about a child’s growth, lifelong friendships, and extended-family traditions. Camp Takajo in Naples says its “underlying philosophy which emphasizes individual growth helps every child thrive in Takajo’s family-oriented environment…. [W]e help children learn to live with others, help them develop self-esteem, independence, and a deepening sense of responsibility, and do so in a way that leads to lasting friendships.” The Maine Camp Experience, a consortium of some of the state’s “finest camps” says “the history, pristine setting and longevity of these camps create a flavor that is uniquely Maine. There is nothing like sitting with friends beside a roaring fireplace in a grand hall or rustic lodge, or under a star-filled sky, singing the same alma maters that campers have been singing for decades.”

When Maine public television ran a series on The Maine Experience, it titled its segment on camps — in which Winnebago featured prominently — simply “The Way Childhood Should Be: Maine Summer Camps”.

Hokey or sentimental? I think it’s genuine — and certainly not manufactured. The top “traditional” camps have not only been around for over 100 years, some have been owned and run by a single family for generations. Andy, Winnebago’s director, is a third-generation owner, and Camp Takajo has had just two owners since its founding in 1947 — the second was a camper in 1970 and then spent every summer afterward at Takajo, as a camper, counselor, associate director, and then owner. These camps are loved: They boast 90 percent and higher return rates among both campers and staff.

Top shelf Maine camps are expensive. Winnebago and other camps charge over $12,000 for a full 7- or 8-week residential program. Still, Maine draws over 20,000 campers from 40 states and 20 countries every summer, and it’s estimated that Maine camps annually inject more than $332 million into the state’s economy — on par, it turns out, with the fisheries industry.

The stretch from Penobscot Narrows Bridge to Depot St. in Livermore Falls was among the least populated of my trip to date. After Belfast we turned interior, making a strong move away from the coast, passing through Augusta, and finding small places like China (and noting across the map to our south many towns with European namesakes: Lisbon, Paris, Norway, Poland, Oxford).

Rural bleakness mixed with trees, open road, and then the occasional lonely, simple house — often surrounded by a vast mown lawn. There were postcard farms and, on the outskirts of Augusta, an old Volvo-lover’s paradise.

Just after Camp Winnebago, along empty Fayette Corner Road, I stumbled across a tiny, isolated cemetery with headstones arranged in concentric rings. The Kent Cemetery — earlier known as the Kent Burying Ground — dates to 1880, but no one can explain the origins of the concentric ring design and the cemetery was not in fact a private family cemetery or affiliated with any church (the Kent family were early area settlers, and the private Kents Hill School is nearby).

The leading clue as to the design is the Wing Family Cemetery a few miles to the south in Wayne — Maine’s only other circular cemetery. The files of the Kent Burying Ground at the National Register of Historic Places surmise that Kent and Wing might both have been laid out by one Alonzo Wing, and further note that circular designs were frequent elements of the “rural” or “garden” cemetery popular at the time for — confusingly — urban cemeteries. As explained in the Kent records:

“It is ironic, however, that the term ‘rural cemetery’ is generally applied to burying yards located outside of urban centers that are manipulated to appear ‘naturalistic,’ while the Kent Cemetery, located in a rural area adopted some of the same concepts to impose a sense of design order on an already natural environment.”