Notes From My Knapsack 6-3-07
Jeff Gill

A Few Words From 1889

Long, long days, warm nights, and food cooked outdoors.

Summer is here, and with the end of school and graduation behind most of us, camp season begins.

There are families that have their own hunk of land and a cabin they may call a camp, and many others camp at a campground that may have little enough ground showing in the camp full of asphalt and travel trailers.

But camp season for me is Scout and church camp, with the opening week always Cub Scout Day Camp.

Next week the Licking District Cub Scout Day Camp takes place out at Camp Falling Rock, under the faithful direction of Ric and Angie Eader from Etna. Over 300 Cubs, and nearly 100 adults and a dozen older Boy Scouts all come together with the theme “From Sea to Shining Sea.”

For seas they have Lake Peewee on the old camp end off Rocky Fork, and the pool up top, where the week long residential camps will fill with Boy Scouts all summer.

For this shakedown week, the younger Cubs will have their turn in the newly cleaned and filled pool – if they can make it up Cardiac Hill. More positive-minded Scout leaders try to call it “Cardio Hill,” which is a good intention, but tradition dies hard.
Some older traditions at Cub Day Camp are carved in stone, like making bird houses and tool boxes, or learning how to fold the American flag, or archery.

When I’m out at Camp Falling Rock, meandering from the original part of the camp around Franklin Lodge (75 years old last year) to the new camp “up top,” the road winds up past Lake Peewee, and levels a bit as Amphitheater Creek gurgles across the rocky path. It’s a kind of breather, with cool air coming out of the stone bluffs, before you slog up Cardiac.

If you look up as you step from rock to rock across the creek, you can barely make out an inscription cut deep, but weathered into the same lichened grey of the surrounding stone.

All it says is “Camp Whip-poor-will,” with the next line “Mount Vernon, 1889.”

It appears to be some kind of church camp, but I’ve never found a precise reference.

What I surmise (note: all that follows is eddicated guesswork, in other words) is that the area was used as a very early Christian Endeavour camp.

Christian Endeavour was originally a youth program, back when no one had youth programs, just a nursery and then “sit in church and be quiet!” It began in Maine at a Congregational (now UCC) church in 1881, and quickly grew, spreading across the US and around the world. The headquarters of this still-extant organization are in . . . Mount Vernon.

An ecumenical youth program, the strength of it was such that whole congregations were founded from the effort, such as Newark’s own Christian Endeavor United Methodist Church. Meanwhile, existing churches could pick it up as their youth meeting structure, and I found a century old, mostly decayed “CE” poster on oilcloth in the attic when I served at Hebron Christian Church.

Now youth programs are the norm, not a new idea, and camps are everywhere. 1889 was well past the pioneer phase of central Ohio, but I suspect Camp Whip-poor-will represents some real pioneering spirit. Whoever organized and led a camp program in 1889 out in northeastern Licking County had enough strength left to carve a message in stone, which tells me they must have planned pretty well.

We don’t believe in marking up the environment today (can you imagine a century of inscriptions each summer?), but most of the values and practices of Camp Whip-poor-will probably line up pretty well with what we do there today.

Whatever you do this summer, make sure to get outside, look around at nature, and make some food for yourself and others without a microwave. Watch a sunset, identify a bird, read a few psalms.

And find something to be thankful for. Thinking about how life was in 1889 can be a good start; then you can think about 2125 and how they’ll marvel at the inconveniences we put up with back in 2007.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about an inscription that caught your eye at knapsack77@gmail.com.