Summer Camps around Asheville and Hendersonville

Book excerpt: Historically, western North Carolina has been a haven for summer camps, sustaining one of the highest concentrations of summer camps in America. For generations, the natural beauty, rustic terrain, and cool climates of the southern Appalachian Mountains have attracted campers from around the world. In the last decades of the 19th century, the summer camp movement arose in the Northeast in response to industrial era concerns about the waning of traditional values and new child development theories. By the turn of the 20th century, the first residential summer camps had emerged around the popular resort towns of Asheville, Hendersonville, Brevard, Black Mountain, and Lake Lure, North Carolina. Founded on lakeshores surrounded by woodlands, these camps offered an array of activities, such as archery, canoeing, horseback riding, swimming, and woodcraft, that instilled lifelong lessons in youth and forged lasting friendships. Today, many of the same camp traditions like council rings and campfire stories are still passed along each summer. Readers will recognize familiar cabins and lakefronts with nostalgia in this collection of vintage photographs.