By William “Skip” Deegans
This Saturday marks the opening of Alderson’s Camp Greenbrier for its 126th season. Founded in 1898, it is considered to be the oldest privately-owned summer camp in the United States. It began as an athletic and academic camp for boys. Dr. Walter Hullihen, its first director and owner, had been a member of the University of Virginia track team. Horace S. Whitman, the first assistant director, participated on the Johns Hopkins track team. The sessions were for two months, campers resided in tents, and the camp was described as being “high up in the Allegheny Mountains, where the nights were often so cool that three and sometime four blankets were needed for comfort.”
Campers rose at sunrise and were not expected at the breakfast table “without trousers, shirt or sweater and hand and face washed and hair brushed.” Mornings were spent studying Latin, Greek, German and mathematics. The early athletic activities included swimming, fishing and boating in the Greenbrier River, baseball, tennis, track and field, and trap shooting.
Counselors were drawn from some of the best colleges and universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Vanderbilt, University of Virginia, and the University of The South. Mothers of young ladies of the south soon realized the camp was full of promising eligible young men. They would bring their daughters to The Greenbrier, and the young women were invited to visit Camp Greenbrier with, of course, proper chaperones. The Richmond Times-Dispatch described one such day when “the ladies entered with vim in all these sports and especially enjoyed the swim in the afternoons, and rowing in the moonlight over the silvery river.”
Sources: The Baltimore Sun, Birmingham Post-Herald, Richmond Times-Dispatch.