Welcome to Camp Hunt Memories
where friendships renew!

Hello friends, former (and present) campers, counselors, staff and board members. I have been processing and organizing the materials I was able to collect and scan at the 60th anniversary reunion this year. There are already many new pictures and documents in the photo albums, more to come. Additions in 1940s-50s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Also the ones I took at the reunion. Meanwhile Andy Ritchie has sent me the manuscript of the very enjoyable talk he gave at the reunion. Please read on.

CAMP HUNT: CHANGING LIVES YESTERDAY

presented at Camp on May, 2007 by Andy Ritchie III

Intro: The year was 1947 and George Pope Gurganus was preaching in Hubbardsville and teaching at Colgate. He had a vision of a camp where the Bible would be taught and lives of children changed forever. He and Irene were still building their family. Her story, as excerpted from a longer work and posted on Joe Perry's Camp Hunt Memories page, will help fill in their story. George had apparently visited Omagh Bible School in Ontario. This was the first of the attempts by our fellowship anywhere in North America to have something like a camping experience. It, however, at that time was little more than a summer Bible training school.

George Gurganus, Lewis Case, Glen Stewart, Carroll Lancaster and Norman Dart were the original trustees who purchases the old Hunt Farm up on this beloved hill. George was the director in the first two years. I came here as the song leader for a couple of weeks in the second summer of operation, 1948. I was 14 years old and I expected the respect that my years deserved - well maybe not - maybe I looked for something more. Anyway George Gurganus was never known to cut anyone any slack and certainly I got nowhere complaining that I didn't come to be a camper, I was staff and I didn't have to do what the campers did. It's a wonder I lasted the two weeks.

Click here to read the whole story.

Gathering on the old steps of Bonnie Lodge. Hugh Liddle on bottom step, Joe Perry (yours truly) sitting on the ground. 1952.

At the start of the summer of 1959 I was not yet ten years old but I was going to Camp Hunt and I was excited about it. I could see in my head a moving picture of me and the other boys laughing and telling stories in one of those big old army tents. In my imagination there was a light bulb hanging down in the middle of the tent giving light to the jovial group. That was the scene in my head. You see I had been to Camp so many times with my parents but never as a full-fledged camper. I wasn't old enough yet. I still wasn't officially old enough but exceptions were sometimes made. My mom and dad had been involved with the Camp work ever since before I was born. Dad was on the board of directors; sometimes he was treasurer, sometimes secretary, sometimes president. But he was always a builder, fixer-upper and an all-around Camp Hunt supporter.

In my childhood we typically went to all the Camp work days. These were spring and early summer days when people from different churches volunteered for tasks that would make the place habitable for the dozens of children, teenagers, college kids and all who would arrive in mid-July for three sessions of two weeks each.

We had stayed the night many times, sleeping on a saggy bed in the old New York state farmhouse we called Bonnie Lodge. I can remember the smell of the old horsehair plaster, the creak of the floor boards on the upstairs landing. But then I was my parents' child; now I was a real camper. I remember looking at my dad and asking permission about something (I don't remember what) but, since my new camp counselor was right there and he was about to leave, he said for me to ask him. It was a new feeling, my dad handing me over to another authority - but that's what he did. So they left and I stayed; whether I stayed one week or two I don't remember but that was my first year at Camp Hunt.

By the way, as I guess you know and as I soon found out, there were no light bulbs hanging from wires in the boys' tents (or in the girls' cabins either). And no fooling around at bedtime. But I was one of the guys and it was at Camp Hunt that a new stage of life began. ...read more.