Owasippe, nation's oldest Boy Scouts camp, celebrates 100th birthday
Published: Friday, July 22, 2011,
They were among a new breed who called themselves Boy Scouts, committed to being helpful, loyal, obedient and brave, among other virtues.
When the Boy Scouts finally disembarked in Whitehall, a world away from the bustle of city life, the townspeople lined the streets to greet them. Dressed in military-style uniforms, the boys paraded through town on their way to their new wilderness outpost on Crystal Lake about 3½ miles away.
There, among the pines, scrub oak and clear waters, they settled Camp Owasippe.
It is those pioneers, and the tens of thousands of Boy Scouts who followed them to the camp in Blue Lake Township, who are being celebrated this weekend during Owasippe Scout Reservation's 100th birthday celebration.
The nation's oldest Boy Scouts camp, nearly as old as the Boy Scouts itself, grew quickly after those first campers arrived to clear the woods. The very next year, 1912, 723 Boy Scouts from 63 different Chicago area troops reportedly would make the voyage to Owasippe. By 1926, 15,000 had made the trek.
They came in droves over the coming years, by ship, then train, school bus and finally private cars as the camp itself morphed, moved and grew.
By the mid-1960s, Owasippe's heyday, between 15,000 and 18,000 Boy Scouts were escaping the city for the Muskegon County wilderness each summer. The camp had grown from its original 40 acres to more than 11,000, and actually had become a “reservation” containing nine separate camps, swimming pools, 100 miles of hiking trails, a separate 40-cabin compound for Scouts' families and three chapels.
But as the Boy Scouts of America, once virtually the only youth organization in America, began to wane in popularity, so did Owasippe. Boys found more to be involved in than just Scouting, and attendance at Owasippe began to shrink.
And so began, in 2005, Owasippe Scout Reservation's darkest years. If not for the stubborn members of the Blue Lake Township Board of Trustees who refused, even in the face of a costly drawn-out legal battle, to grant residential zoning needed for a $19 million sale to a developer, Owasippe most likely wouldn’t have survived to celebrate its centennial.
But with appeals court judges siding with the township, and rank-and-file Chicago Scouts tossing the former leadership, the summer migration of city kids to the Michigan woods continues.
A healing place
When Chauncey Niziol was 15, his father, an alcoholic, tried to commit suicide. As if that wasn't hard enough on young Niziol, his father had tried hanging himself with a rope the teenager had made as a Boy Scouts project.
A week later, the devastated teen left for Owasippe with his Chicago Boy Scouts troop. In hindsight, it was exactly what he needed.
“I went to camp, and came back better,” said Niziol, who camped as a Boy Scout at Owasippe from 1965-69. “Explain that one. Dirt? Sand? Trees?”
Of course, Niziol knows the answer to that: yes, yes, and yes. Nature is a healing place. He even wrote an article after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks about how nature can heal.
When asked about his most memorable times at Owasippe, Niziol talks about learning to swim when he was 11, and about watching a bald eagle glide the length of Wolverine Lake without once flapping its wings.
And then he brings up an image forever etched in his mind: that of his young daughters, visiting Owasippe for the first time, walking down a trail ahead of him and marveling at nature's bounty around them.
The thought chokes him up, and he goes silent.
Sounds of the woods
In recent years, Owasippe Scout Reservation has hosted about 3,500 Boy Scouts each summer at its two main camps, each of which has its own distinct personality. The more rustic Camp Wolverine, located on pristine Lake Wolverine, has a swimming pool but no dining hall. Meals are prepared in a central kitchen and delivered to troops at the site.
Camp Blackhawk has its own dining hall but no swimming pool. Swimming is done in Big Blue Lake.
Scouts use Owasippe's Manistee Quest as a staging point for week-long hiking or canoe trips in the Manistee National Forest. A Webelos camp caters to the youngest Scouts.
It is Owasippe's programs that attract many of the Scout troops who can use the ropes course, climbing tower, horse-riding corral and sailing school in addition to the traditional hiking, fishing, shooting sports and crafts.
“It's a unique piece of property — there's so many things the kids can do,” said Chuck Dobbins, Scout Executive for the Chicago Area Council of Boy Scouts of America. “Boys grow up looking at the adventure shows, the survivor shows on TV. Kids watch that and think 'I'd like to do that.' This is their chance to do that.”
And like those first Scouts who arrived 100 years ago, Scouts who still primarily come from Chicago have the chance — some of them for the first time — to experience life outside the city. For many, they didn't even know what it was like to be in the dark, true dark, away from neon signs, street lamps and the swirling lights of police cars, Dobbins said.
“For many of them it's the first time they've been out of their neighborhood,” Dobbins said. “The sounds are different. The ambient noise, the sounds of the woods, are dramatically different from the sounds of the city, even when the city is quiet.”
Campfire traditions
Overnight trips into the wilderness, away from the comforts, however rustic, of the camp are a favorite of many Scouts. Joe Sener loved the overnight trips he took by canoe, first as a camper in the mid-1960s and then as a staff member in the late '60s and early '70s. He remembers a camping spot on the White River near Hilt's Landing where they'd pull up their canoes and set up their tents that was referred to as the “Indian burial grounds.”
Adding to the allure of the woods — and promoted in cheesy fashion until it became politically incorrect — was the mystique of the Native American Indians, including Chief Owasippe of the Potawatomi Nation, that once inhabited the land.
An "Owasippe Scout Camps" brochure from 1927.
One year it was Sener's turn to portray the offended Indian.
“I'm standing in an Indian headdress and start to admonish the kids and one of the kids goes 'That's crazy Joe Sener,'” Sener recalls. “And the kid standing next to him said 'Bull----.'
“He was absolutely convinced I was an Indian spirit.”
Gift from Whitehall
The history of Owasippe is closely tied to the history of the Boy Scouts of America itself. It was William D. Boyce, a publisher from Chicago, who in 1910 incorporated several loosely-structured scouting groups into the BSA, which he based on a British scouting program.
One of few organized activities for boys, the Boy Scouts of America merged military discipline and honor with frontiersmen survival skills. It caught on like wild fire.
At the time, many of the leaders in Whitehall had ties to Chicago and learned of Boyce's new organization and its desire to establish an outdoor camp. The Whitehall Chamber of Commerce decided to donate 40 acres of property on Crystal Lake to the fledgling organization in 1910.
And so began the long relationship Chicagoans have enjoyed with the residents in and around Whitehall.
“To us here at Whitehall it meant a new industry; it meant perpetual youth during our summer months; it added much-needed life to a community that was struggling to build a recreation industry out of the ashes left by the sawmills at the wane of that area,” Clarence E. Pitkins, a leading Whitehall businessman, wrote in 1941 to recognize the camp's 30th anniversary.
In 1913, just two years after the camp was established, an administration building was built, complete with dining hall, that could seat 300, a kitchen, ice house, a photography dark room with running water and a camp store.
Brown duffels
Paul Peraino first came to Owasippe in 1946. He came by train and hiked into a camp that he says was “really rustic” in those days.
All the Scouts packed their gear into the same types of brown duffel bags, that would be hauled to a site for them and dumped in one big pile. One of the biggest challenges facing the Scouts was locating which of the identical duffels was theirs, Peraino says.
“Otherwise, you'd be wearing another kids clothes for a week,” says Peraino, who now oversees Owasippe's E. Urner Goodman Museum.
On an overnight canoe trip, he remembers the Scout carrying all the food capsized his canoe and the food sank to the bottom of the river — all except for apples that bobbed to the surface.
“All we had to eat the rest of the trip was apples.”
City in the woods
Over the years, the camp merged with other nearby camps and the Boy Scouts acquired more land for the sprawling reservation.
By the 1960s, Owasippe was essentially its own city in the woods, complete with post office, grocery store and a village of cabins where Scouts' families stayed. There were 400 staff members to serve the thousands of Scouts who would come up each summer. The kitchen could churn out 5,000 meals at a time.
“There were just massive amounts of kids here,” Niziol said. “On Sundays, there were lines of yellow school buses (bringing the Scouts) up U.S. 31.”
Sener, who with Niziol is co-chairman of this weekend's 100th anniversary celebration, said Scouts looked forward to a “chance to get out of the city.”
By the mid-1980s, the stream of Scouts headed for Owasippe began to drop off, and large sections of the 12,000-acre reservation were sold for residential development. While Scouting for years was the only organization for youth, more opportunities sprang up, and the allure of frontiersmen adventures lost its widespread appeal.
Nonetheless, today Scouts keep coming, many of them brought by fathers who feel compelled to pass on the connection to nature that is Owasippe.
“This is such a safe haven,” Niziol said. “When you get a kid out in the woods, you let them expand. The neat thing is they come back different. They come back a little more self-reliant. They come back a little better than when they left. I think that's because you gave them the freedom to make decisions and to take a step out on their own.”
Growing up
Louis Kuszynski is one of those fathers who introduced his sons to Owasippe. Kuszynski himself camped at Owasippe from 1973-77.
When he first came to camp in 2005, Kuszynski's oldest son Richard had his eye on a pocket knife at the camp trading post. But Kuszynski says he told his son he was too young to have a knife.
But as the two-week session came to a close, Kuszynski decided he would buy the knife for his boy. In one of those coming-of-age moments between a boy and his father, Kuszynski pulled aside his son after a campfire and presented it to Richard.
As he tells his story, Kuszynski, a detective with the Chicago Police Department, chokes up, overcome by the emotion of his memory. Owasippe has a way of doing that to grown men.
This summer, Richard is on staff at Owasippe's Camp Blackhawk.
“There's something about this place that just keeps bringing people home,” Kuszynski says.
'Save Owasippe'
Five years ago, a profound sense of sadness clouded Owasippe's 95th anniversary celebration. The Chicago Council of Boy Scouts had announced its intention to sell the
The township refused to grant the rezoning, the Boy Scouts sued in 2006 and so began a years-long court battle to save Owasippe for future generations. There were plenty of arguments as to why the land should be saved from the bulldozer, among them the fact that it's a sanctuary to 14 endangered or protected species.
But the Boy Scouts Council argued the land was theirs to do with as they pleased, and that it could no longer afford the necessary upkeep in the face of declining numbers of campers. As the battle wore on, “Save Owasippe” yard signs sprouted throughout Muskegon County, and, unbeknownst to many local residents, war was being waged in Chicago as well — within the council itself.
In 2008, Muskegon County Circuit Court Judge William Marietti ruled in favor of Blue Lake Township, which suffered under massive legal bills. And in Chicago, there was a shakeup on the board of directors, and Dobbins was brought in as the new Scout executive — a man who proved to be much more sensitive to Owasippe's role in Chicago Scouting.
Even still, Marietti's ruling was appealed to the Michigan Court of Appeals — a move aimed at establishing Owasippe's property value more than anything, Dobbins said at the time. The appeals court in 2010 upheld Marietti's opinion, and the Chicago Council gave up the fight.
Moving on
For Blue Lake Township Supervisor Don Studaven, who was Owasippe's property manager from 1986-94, there was never a question that the township had to hang in and battle against the sale of Owasippe until the end.
“We had to keep it like it is,” said Studaven, who spent years attending Owasippe as a Scout leader in the 1960s. “This is a camp community.”
Studaven admits “hurt feelings” are difficult to put aside, even now. Perhaps he's jaded by the experience, or just worn out from the fight. When asked if he thinks Owasippe will last another 100 years, Studaven's response was “I doubt it.”
There's too much emphasis on technology these days and too few people who know or understand the value of a place like Owasippe, he said.
“Who knows what's going to be in the future, but I don't think so,” he said of a 200th anniversary for Owasippe. “I hate to see it go, but I won't be here — I hope.”
Dobbins said he's focused on preparing the camp for the future.
To get the needed capital to improve the camp's facilities, the Chicago Council now is looking, with the help of the Nature Conservancy, for a “conservation buyer” who will buy the property and then place it in perpetual conservation, preserving it forever in its wild state. He said this economy isn't conducive to finding such a buyer, but the Council has time to wait.
Dobbins and others will be in town today for Owasippe's big birthday bash. While they celebrate around campfires and reminisce about the old days, Dobbins said he'll be looking forward — to making Owasippe “one of the nation's premier Boy Scout camps.”
“This is exciting for us because it's a jumping-off point for the next 100 years,” Dobbins said. “We've been talking enough about where we've been.
“We need to look at where we're going.”
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