Camp Catawba was a summer camp for boys near the town of Blowing Rock in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Blowing Rock is a town in Watauga and Caldwell counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The population was 1,241 at the 2010 census.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are a physiographic province of the larger Appalachian Mountains range. The mountain range is located in the eastern United States, and extends 550 miles southwest from southern Pennsylvania through Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. This province consists of northern and southern physiographic regions, which divide near the Roanoke River gap. To the west of the Blue Ridge, between it and the bulk of the Appalachians, lies the Great Appalachian Valley, bordered on the west by the Ridge and Valley province of the Appalachian range.
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. North Carolina is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the 50 United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and South Carolina to the south, and Tennessee to the west. Raleigh is the state's capital and Charlotte is its largest city. The Charlotte metropolitan area, with an estimated population of 2,569,213 in 2018, is the most populous metropolitan area in North Carolina, the 23rd-most populous in the United States, and the largest banking center in the nation after New York City. North Carolina's second largest populated area is the Research Triangle Region, with an estimated population of 2,238,315 in 2018, and is home to the largest research park in the United States, Research Triangle Park, centrally located in the "Triangle" formed by Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh.
It was established in 1944 by Vera Lachmann (1904–1985), a poet, classicist and educator who emigrated from Germany in 1939. In 1947 she was joined by the composer Tui St. George Tucker (1924–2004), who was the camp's music director. Camp Catawba closed after the 1970 season. The camp's nearest neighbors and indispensable practical aids were Mr. and Mrs. Ira W. and Sally Lentz Bolick, a mountain farm couple who descended from 18th-century German immigrants to America. [1]
Vera Lachmann was a German poet, classicist and educator. After founding a school for Jewish children in Nazi Germany, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and established Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys.
Lorraine "Tui" St. George Tucker was an American microtonal composer and recorder player and instrument developer.
Camp Catawba was small in size—the property was about 20 acres (81,000 m2), about half in fields (one of them a hillside) and half in forest. The forest was characterized by red oak and black locust, white pine and hemlock, as well as rosebay and Catawba rhododendron. The camp was also small in numbers—a maximum of 35 campers with an age range from 5 to 12. The boys attended for a full eight-week session.
Cash poor but culturally rich, Camp Catawba was guided by Vera Lachmann's idealism, her upbringing in Weimar Germany, and her finding at Catawba a haven from the torment of the Nazi era. [2]
The boys at Catawba participated in traditional summer camp activities—ball games (on a sloping field), swimming (in a spring-fed pond and later in a modern pool), horseback riding (at stables in Blowing Rock), and hiking throughout the 3,000-acre (12 km2) Cone Estate (now the Moses H. Cone Memorial Park) which bordered the camp, and across Grandfather Mountain.
It was cultural programs that distinguished the camp. Vera Lachmann, who taught classics at Brooklyn College, told the campers the Iliad and the Odyssey in alternating summers, and directed a drama program that included plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes; Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller and Yeats; and Nelly Sachs, who was a friend of hers. The music program, under Tui St. George Tucker, consisted of a choir, an orchestra (with some parts adjusted according to the instrumentalists available), and private lessons, particularly on the recorder, her professional specialty. Baroque (especially Bach) and early nineteenth century classical music (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert) predominated. The boys also performed Gregorian chants and other medieval music, and Tucker's arrangements of Negro spirituals. Some arts counselors went on to become respected professionals including: Eva Frankfurther, Thomas Locker, Hannibal Alkhas, Mark di Suvero, and Richard Pepitone.
Eva Frankfurther was a German-born British artist, notable for depicting the immigrant communities of the East End of London in the 1950s.
Thomas Locker was an American painter and author He was born in New York City and died in Albany, NY
Marco Polo "Mark" di Suvero is an abstract expressionist sculptor and 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient.
Throughout Catawba's 27 summers, most of the campers and many of the staff came from New York City and Washington DC. In the beginning many of the boys were the sons of parents who, like Lachmann, had fled Nazi Germany. This also meant they were mostly Jewish - though Catawba was decidedly ecumenical and Lachmann read from both the Old and New Testaments at Sunday services. An article from 1951 in The Blowing Rocket, the local weekly newspaper, captures Lachmann's idealism, as well as the anomaly of Catawba in the southern mountains at the time: "There are in the camp today 29 boys from France, Germany, Norway, South American countries, New York and New Jersey, just as a sample of the various nationalities which the camp attracts. Absolutely no race or creed is turned away, and soon possibly color will be no bar to admission to the camp." [3] Catawba integrated in 1964.
The physical heart of the camp was a chestnut lodge, constructed in 1913 before the blight decimated the American chestnut forests of the southern Appalachians. In 1985 the National Park Service purchased the camp grounds from Tui St. George Tucker, who inherited the site from Vera Lachmann, and on Tucker's death the Park Service took possession of the property. As of 2010, Park Service officials are deciding whether to preserve the chestnut lodge and how to interpret the camp to the public. [4]
The chestnuts are a group of eight or nine species of deciduous trees and shrubs in the genus Castanea, in the beech family Fagaceae. They are native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.
The National Park Service (NPS) is an agency of the United States federal government that manages all national parks, many national monuments, and other conservation and historical properties with various title designations. It was created on August 25, 1916, by Congress through the National Park Service Organic Act and is an agency of the United States Department of the Interior. The NPS is charged with a dual role of preserving the ecological and historical integrity of the places entrusted to its management while also making them available and accessible for public use and enjoyment.
