100 Years of Camping to Celebrate America's 250th!

This week we are taking a look at the first 100 years of recreational camping in the US!

This episode is purely for fun and entertainment and we have done our best to represent historical events accurately. 

Happy Birthday America and Happy Camping!!

Transcript

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Welcome to Camp Mindowinia, where we're reviving the vintage camping vibe in the Midwest. There is so much to see and do in the Midwest, and we want to share it with everyone. So on this show, we'll be talking about all things camping as we explore the states of our name. Good to have you back at camp, everyone. I'm Liv and I'm here today with my longtime camping buddy and sister Ab. Hi everybody! As we have just finished celebrating, well, actually, this is a year-long celebration, really, of the 250th birthday of America, we are bringing you a special episode today on the first 100 years of recreational camping in the United States. So we're gonna break down this history decade by decade, starting in the 1860s and finishing up in the 1960s. Maybe we'll do another episode down the road covering the 1960s to present day. But this is really kind of the formative years of recreational camping in the United States. And so that's why we're focusing on these today. Ab, do you want to start us out? Many people, including the Smithsonian, attribute the beginning of recreational camping to have been started by William H. Murray. So he was a Yale graduate who was also a minister, but he would take these breaks into the Adirondacks to, you know, recharge, connect with the Lord, get inspiration for his sermons. And then he wrote pages and pages and pages of notes on it. By 1869, he had told a friend about his campaign that had been going on for several years like this. And his friend was like, I know a publisher who I think would like to publish your notes and your ideas on how to do this in a book. So he threw everything together and the friend took it to the publisher. And within two days, the publisher was rushing it to get it print ready. Oh my gosh. I know this is amazing. It was crazy. So it was like super fast because the publisher's like, this is gonna be something big. And the book, Adventures in the Wilderness, was published a few months later, and that really springboarded people into the idea of camping. And not just as a way of survival or going out west, but for fun and relaxation. Skipping to the next decade, in 1875, another book was written, and this was by John Bechelder or Bachelder. And it was called Popular Resorts and How to Reach Them. Now, Adventures in the Wilderness, that 1869 title, was primarily about canoe camping. So reaching your destination in the Adirondack Mountains by canoe and then setting up your camp. John Bechelder was offering some new ways to enjoy camping, and he came up with three or kind of categorized three methods. They were on foot, on horseback, or by horse and wagon. Horse and wagon, I think, would be like the very earliest experience in the United States of camping with an RV. Yeah. So you could carry your belongings in your wagon, you could sleep in the wagon, have someplace off the ground, out of the rain, et cetera. These new methods or new suggestions on how to camp really made it accessible to a lot more people, even than the canoe camping idea had been, because canoe camping really only works when you have water present. But this offered a way for people to camp in different landscapes. Now, at this time, camping was still primarily done by people who were affluent enough to take time off of work. People in the 1800s didn't have paid time off. Yeah. You know, they didn't have the freedom that we have today. So this was something that would have been for the people who were wealthy enough to take the time off to escape and also, you know, weren't living in kind of like a survival situation or, you know, hand-to-mouth personal economic situation as a lot of the middle and lower classes were. Yeah. And then we're actually going to skip two decades because not much else developed in the camping world at the end of the 19th century. So just getting into the 20th century, in 1908, Thomas Hurum Holding's book inspired another wave of camping popularity. He focused more on the idea of tenting and trying to, you know, pack in or something more like that in modern jargon. Skipping ahead again to 1911, Model T's, the Ford Model T became widely produced. It was an affordable option, and your average middle class American was able to start buying a vehicle. Yes. And thank goodness for that, because I don't think I'm cut out for wagon camping. Yes. Horseback camping might be fun though. Yeah, that could be. With the wide expansion of affordable autos, a lot of lightweight tent trailers started coming on the market. These would be like a little trailer you towed behind your car that would have flaps that would fold open, a frame you would attach, and then some kind of tent that you would put on this little trailer. So sort of like the precursor to a pop-up camper. I was just gonna say that the birth of the pop-up. Yes, although the birth of the real pop-up comes a little bit later on. Because these ones would have been really basic and not had amenities inside them, right? Correct. Yeah. Yep. They were basically just a dry place to t to sleep, just like a tent would be, only they were, you know, obviously lifted off the ground. The trailer would be really a way of transporting not only your tent, but also your your other gear. Oh, yeah. So by the 1910s, camping really was widespread. It was popular, it was accessible, it was affordable. Pretty much everyone was able. I mean, if you were physically able, you were able to camp. Yeah. However, in 1915, nationwide media coverage highlighted a very interesting camping expedition, we'll say. So the Conklin family, known at the time for the gas and electric motorbus company, left Huntington, New York in a camping vehicle called the Gypsy Van as sort of the first camping influencers. Wow. Yes. I mean, think about it. They're, you know, a family. They uh manufactured or commissioned the manufacture of a custom camping unit. They take off across country on a multi-month journey and are heavily followed by the media. Everyone knows what's going on. It's in all the local newspapers. They're being tracked stop by stop across the country. I mean, really, they're kind of like viral camping influencers of the early 1900s. Wouldn't you say? So if you think, oh, influencers are a new thing, nope. They've been around for over a hundred years. Different media, same concept. Yes. The gypsy van was a marvel in its day, and actually could be even to this day. It was 25 feet long, 16,000 pounds, and fully equipped with even what we would consider luxuries by modern standards. It had hot and cold running water. So, like it had a shower on board. We would not see showers on board in another RV until the late 1940s. The full kitchen on board had running water. It had an ice box with actual ice in it, as this was only 1915. It had filtered, chilled drinking water. That is impressive. Like my camper doesn't even have that option. Right. And then it had some brand new innovations that wouldn't really be widely used until, again, the 1940s. And these were um a water pump, two generators, a battery, all kinds of things. It had a winch, sofas that converted into beds, you know, all the things you would consider to be standard camping fare in a modern camping unit, but were absolutely unheard of in 1915. Some other notable features were they had a sundeck on the roof that could be covered with shade in case of bad weather or just, you know, too much sun. Uh-huh. And then they even had a garden on board, which makes you think, how on earth was that possible? Yeah. They had a vegetable garden on the roof to supply them with fresh fruits and veggies anywhere on the road. The reason that was possible was because how fast were they traveling, Liv? They were maxing out around 15 miles per hour. Which I can't even fathom. In this day and age, I'm like, we'll go hundreds of miles in a day, like it's nothing. Yes. But these people were just crawling along, sitting on their sundeck, waiting the garden. Right. No wonder it took them three months to cross from New York to California. Yeah, and I'm sure they were putting in solid days of travel, too. They probably were. Now, a portion of the journey, the family had to leave their, we'll call it an RV, because the father, uh, Roland Conklin, was needed at work. So for a small portion of the journey, the RV was towed. But then they traveled to it, they got back on, and they finished the journey aboard. Wow. This unit seated 17 up to 17 people. Dang. They had a full staff on board. They had a a cook. They had like a maid. I believe there were others, but I can't remember. And then it comfortably slept eight people, and more people could be fitted in in a pinch. Yes. And they had two chauffeurs to be able to keep the drive like around the clock. The next major news in camping history zooms us ahead to 1926, exactly 100 years ago today. Well, not today, but from this year. Yeah. And that was when Route 66 was first established to create a continuous highway connecting rural agricultural communities to major cities. As you probably know, Route 66 connects Chicago, Illinois, to Los Angeles, California. And in that time period, we didn't have a transcontinental highway system. Yeah. So this was a route that was established to connect these little community roads, state roads, small stints of federal roads to connect from one major city to another that people could just get on the route and have a way to get from the smaller surrounding communities into the cities. Yeah. Something that was interesting about camping in the 1920s is that roads were really unreliable at this time. In fact, large portions of Route 66 were gravel. Yeah. And they would not be paved. The whole of Route 66, rather, would not be paved until 1938. Wow. So traveling by car, even though cars were accessible, roads really weren't. They could be rutted if they're a gravel road. If you've ever driven on a gravel road, you know the challenges it can present from you know the beginning of the spring thaw and through the spring rains. They can just be several inches deep of mud. And, you know, those old little tires, they might have difficulty traveling through that. I mean, modern vehicles have difficulty traveling through some of the conditions on gravel roads. And of course, the other roads were not being maintained like our roads are today. And so this made traveling large or long distances rather difficult. Definitely. Recreational camping was about to have a major upgrade. In 1929, a man named Arthur Sherman took a family camping trip that turned out to be disastrous. Oh no. They were camping with a tent and a thunderstorm whipped up. And I say disastrous, but it was really disastrous to him. And if you've been camping in a in a thunderstorm, you know how disastrous it can feel. Yes. Fortunately, no one was injured and there were no fatalities. However, they could not get their tent set up in the rain for anything. And they ended up sleeping all night long through a rainstorm, sopping wet, no shelter. And it made it so that they determined they were never going camping again. Oh no. So he returned home. He was, quite frankly, he was fed up with camping as a pastime. He's like, this is not working. This who would do this for fun? Yeah. So he hired a carpenter, and together they worked on designing what he called a cabin on wheels. Ooh. This was a little squared-off boxy trailer like had never been seen before. It had running water. Their running water was not as fancy as the Conklins a few years earlier, but it was operated by a hand pump, just like you would have, you know, outside in the in the 1800s, what you would imagine a hand pump would look like inside the camper, and you would hand pump to have running water in your kitchen sink. Cool. It had a little stove for heat, and it had a sofa that converted into a bed. When his camping trailer was completed, he took his family out for another camping trip. And the improvement on the quality of experience was unmatched, as you can imagine. Yeah. It was a wonderful, fun experience. When they arrived at the campsite, they got were able to get right into their camper. No setting up a tent, no exposure to the elements. It was everything we know RVing to be. Yeah. In fact, the trip was so satisfactory that he made more of them and then debuted the design at the 1930 Detroit Auto Show. I forgot to mention he was in Detroit. Oh, okay. The success was instant. In the first year, they did only produce about 117 of these that were sold to consumers. But in later years, by like 1935, they were producing more than a thousand units per month. Wow. Yes, this had taken the nation by storm. Everyone wanted to camp in an RV. I wish Scamp could take a hint from them because they seem to produce like five per month in the modern era. They produce five a year. A detail I forgot to mention was that he had opened the covered wagon company. So these early trailers were called covered wagons. Fun. Arthur Sherman and others in the 1930s pioneered many firsts in RVing and camping technology. Some were electric brakes for trailers, a waterproof exterior, these were both attributed to Arthur Sherman, running water inside of campers, although that of course had been done a little bit better years earlier, a lead-lined icebox, and the jackknife sofa. Wow. On top of that, another thing that first came into mainstream use during the 1930s was gas camp stoves. So before that, they had mostly cooked over fires. And I mean they did continue to do that because obviously gear is expensive. But this was when they first became something that could be put in the camper or something that would be more portable to take with you on a tenting adventure. Camping during the depression was still very much so a thing because it was such a nice, inexpensive escape from kind of the harsh reality of every day with the economy being so bad. And it also created the first full timers because yes, during the depression, people started taking to their campers to live because they could travel along with the work. So yeah. Then, of course, since there was so much more of a need and a desire for camping, we started to see campgrounds popping up in more locations. They had initially just started on the East Coast, but by this point in time, they started spreading westward. And that brings us to the 1940s, which saw a crazy rise in like your average Joe owning a travel trailer or even making their own DIY ones. That's so cool. Were these a kit? Um, there may have been kits, but I was actually just reading a blog post by some elderly person who was saying that, oh yeah, my parents just kind of built one on a trailer we bought. Wow. And my neighbors had one, they built one. Yeah. So literally they were going to the lumber yard picking stuff up and putting one together. That is so cool. I know it's so fun. Also in the 1940s is when we saw the beginning of sleepaway summer camps for kids, and they were held like held in tents. So it was really like a form of camping. Yeah, I have to say, like, probably my first exposure to knowledge of vintage camping, other than of course, like pioneer camping, was through the Molly books. Um, they were an American girl book. I don't know if they still make them or not. Um, and she's a girl in the 1940s who, in one of the books, goes to a summer camp. Yeah. And it just seemed like the most fun, classic 1940s thing to do. So it is interesting that that was kind of like a major boom or expansion of kids' summer camps. Yeah, definitely. During this time, canned goods, bread, or things that wouldn't spoil easily were usually what people brought on camping trips because coolers were not very reliable at that point in time, and your food would frequently spoil or get soggy or wrecked in some way because they just couldn't keep the food good. Early-ish in the 1940s, 1944 to be exact, a national system for interstate highways plan was discussed by the federal government, and it was even authorized in 1944. There just wasn't enough funding to execute the plan. But it was becoming known that the roads were the problem in America at the time. Moving into the 1950s, the rising affluence of post-war Americans meant the perfect conditions for the next camping boom. This was the official start of modern camping as we know it. Camping was no longer the rugged, roughing it experience of the 1800s and early 1900s, or even the primitive comfort of the 1920s and 30s. In the 1950s, camping became a glamorous family pastime. The invention of the modern day camper, which is really a style of glamping, first came on the market. One of the ways this came about was with the first making and selling of the Volkswagen van, which was used primarily for moving materials and camping. And that happened in 1950. With your average camper having more money to spend on camping gear, of course, the market responded with many innovations in camping gear. The nylon tent was invented and also metal tent poles. Before that, tents had primarily been constructed out of wood poles and canvas. They were very heavy, very hard to lug around. And these new modern tents in the 1950s were relatively lightweight. Almost anyone could carry them and they were easier to set up. And while those may have been available in the 1950s, they were a bit more expensive and hard to come by because people were still using the canvas materials. It was when the 60s came around that we saw them start to really take over. Another one of the innovations that happened in the 1950s was the invention of a portable camping grill. And these were, of course, fueled by propane or other fuel sources. You know, before that, they had wood setups, like grills to go over fires. But no, this was like a grill like we would have now that you could take with you on the road. However, the biggest change for camping in the United States came about in 1956 when the Federal Aid Highway Act was passed, and the funding was provided for building a 41,000 mile national system of interstate highways. Wow. Yeah, it was going to cost $25 billion and take 13 years to complete. This would make cross country travel time. Dramatically decreased and make traveling across multiple states accessible to literally everyone. Wow. In the 1950s, we also saw countless RV manufacturers come on the market. Some sources have even said like thousands of RV manufacturers. So these might have been like small local ones included in this number, as well as more of the well-known national names, such as, well, some of these existed already, but there was major growth for manufacturers like Airstream, Shasta, Saroscotty, Coleman, and pop-up pioneers. Another detail I forgot to mention was in the 1950s was when the first modern-day pop-up camper was invented. The hard top soft side pop-up camper that we know today became a thing in the 1950s. Cool. In 1959, the company Forester opened and they designed the iconic canned ham. Lives first camper. My first camper was a canned ham. So along with all of the initiatives to get more roads and higher quality roads, we also saw an increase in federal funding for national parks to make their campgrounds, well, they're to have campgrounds at them, all of them, and also to make them up to par with the more modern standard of what you need. You know, for instance, bathrooms, shower houses, electric hookups. Yes. It wasn't just pitch a tent somewhere and there's no amenities. So we saw a really big increase in the amenities at national and state parks at this point in time, as well as a huge uptick in camper van use. Camper vans just exploded. There were more manufacturers making them, and people were just thinking of them as a way to live a more free on-the-road lifestyle. In 1965, Honda released the first portable generator that was affordable and easily accessible for anyone to be able to buy. Up until that point, they weren't like an easy-to-buy or small enough item you'd want to take them. So at this point in time, that was now an option. And then that was followed by the first internal frame backpack in 1967 that made backpack camping and packing in camping much easier because it was so much more lightweight and was a more innovative waterproof technology. There was also an expansion in new types of waterproof camping gear, such as sleeping bags, tents being accessible everywhere, polyester fill-in things that before would have had down, which would have created a soggy, heavy mess. All these innovations helped make camping a mainstream activity. So there you have a brief history of the last, well, the first rather 100 years of camping in America. And looking back at how far the RV industry has come, at how far the camping industry, but also just the camping community and experience have come, we have an incredibly rich camping culture in the United States. And I know that the rest of the world is kind of joining on the camping bandwagon in recent years, and which is fantastic. This is an amazing hobby. It's an amazing way to spend time and see the country, you know, touring and sightseeing and connecting with nature. And it's really exciting that this is now something that's becoming an accessible leisure pastime worldwide. We are so happy that at Camp Mindowinia, we get to be part of that American camping culture and we get to share our love and passion for it with you guys. And with that, we wish America and Americans a happy 250th birthday, and that is our show for this week. Thanks for listening to the Camp Mindowinia Podcast. If you want to connect with us, head over to our Facebook group, Camp Mindewinia, or follow us on Instagram at Camp Mindowinia. Take us on Instagram in your camping posts for the chance to be featured on our page. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow us on your favorite podcasting platform, and we'd love it if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or a comment on Spotify. Join us next Monday for another episode. Bye, guys!