Dammie Day and campers, circa 1940s
There are times when moments in history seem to reflect each other. As we planned for and now reflect back on the 2021 summer during the global Coronavirus pandemic, stories from the summer of 1948 seem to resonate in new ways. When our founder, Dammie Day, prepared to open camp for the 1948 season she faced the serious threat of a growing polio epidemic, which spiked to its highest point in North Carolina that year.
Polio, a virus which spreads quickly, particularly among children and especially in warmer months, infects the spinal cord and can cause paralysis or even death. The nationwide polio epidemic was rising significantly in the late 1940s, and North Carolina was the epicenter of multiple outbreaks in the summer of 1948. On July 17, 1948, The New York Times reported the highest daily number of cases to date in North Carolina. Merrie-Woode campers had arrived to camp just two weeks before, and parents panicked.
As case numbers continued to rise in the early days of the camp session, Dammie took every precaution to provide a safe and healthy summer for her Merrie-Woode girls. She wrote weekly updates to her campers’ parents to assure them that camp would continue to be safe. Most of the polio infections were seen in the eastern part of the state, but when a camper at a nearby camp in Brevard, NC became infected, Merrie-Woode went into an immediate voluntary quarantine. Seven campers were withdrawn the following weekend, leaving campers and counselors worried as they watched their friends and cabin mates abruptly leave camp.
Dammie and her grandson, Sherwood, on the steps of Hilltop, circa 1946 -1948.
Dammie reached out to the North Carolina State Board of Health for advice on July 13, 1948. She wrote, “We are meeting panic on the part of some parents from other states, as are all camps in North Carolina…We have had several pediatricians, some of whom have daughters in our camp, state emphatically that the children are as safe, if not safer in camp than they would be back home in cities. We feel that if we comply with all the suggested precautions which you…may make, we will be giving our children the maximum protection possible.” She listed some of the imposed health and safety measures at Merrie-Woode as: taking no campers for less than the full eight week session, any campers who arrived from infected areas of the country were quarantined and isolated before arriving to camp for 14 days, limiting the ability of counselors to leave camp on their days off, allowing no trips out of camp to public spaces, and allowing no visitors into camp that summer. Sherwood Lewis, Dammie’s grandson, remembers the postman having to drop all mail off at the end of the camp road. Deliveries and supplies were left there as well, and Sherwood would ride with camp’s groundskeeper, James Pressley, in the camp truck to pick them up while wearing face masks if meeting a delivery driver.
We reached out to a few of our alumnae from the summer of 1948 for their memories of life at camp during the polio epidemic.
Jeanette Kennedy Hancock recalls Dammie Day consulting with her father, a well-known pediatrician in Birmingham, AL, about how to handle the epidemic. “As a camper, I wasn’t very aware of the pandemic worries of the outside world; but, of course, we were very aware of it in Birmingham.” Dammie continued to consult with Dr. Hughes Kennedy throughout that summer. She wrote in one weekly parent bulletin that he stated Merrie-Woode was, “taking every possible precaution to protect the health of our campers, and he feels that the children are as safe here as they can be anywhere, and certainly more happily and healthily occupied.”
Lizora Miller Yonce’s most vivid memory is that there were absolutely “no visitors allowed” at camp, even though her family was staying just down the road at High Hampton in Cashiers, NC. “We were all very fearful.”
Harriet Cooper recalled, “There were some communities, such as Savannah, GA, where parents were especially worried, and many of those girls had to stay home or were picked up by their parents early in the summer. They were understandably fearful. The rest of us didn’t have a care in the world, and we just focused on our camp activities such as boating and swimming. Later in life while at St. Mary’s Junior College, I remember being much more fearful when a classmate had to be placed in an Iron Lung. We would visit her and the only way she could see us was by looking at a special mirror over her bed. It was the most awful thing you could imagine.”
With an outbreak in Atlanta, Ellen Ansley Hardison recalled how thrilled she and Nancy Carter Bland were to “have” to quarantine for two months at camp. Campers had reason to be glad to be at camp instead of in their home towns. Across the country in cities and towns with outbreaks, playgrounds, youth centers, and public pools were closed. Movie theatres refused admission to children under 16, and churches canceled Sunday school and youth activities. Later that fall schools delayed opening until cooler weather arrived and the virus was less likely to spread.
While Dammie was dealing with the polio crisis here at Merrie-Woode, Camp’s future director, Fritz Orr, Sr., was managing the epidemic at Fritz Orr Camp just north of Atlanta, GA. His daughter, Tinsley Orr Northen, had contracted and survived polio in 1944. “In those days, everyone was terrified of polio,” she recalls. “I remember receiving a spinal tap at Egleston Children’s Hospital in Atlanta to confirm I had it. Our family doctor called my father immediately and instructed him to send all the campers and staff at the Fritz Orr Camp home right away. My little sister and brother [Polly Orr Bates and Fritz Orr, Jr.] quarantined with my grandmother…Several times a day, nurses would put hot, scratchy wool cloths on me and make me lay flat all the time, which was not fun nor something an 8-year-old can do. The disease struck my face but lasted only briefly, thank God. I was extremely fortunate and blessed.”
While campers and counselors certainly had much to fear in that summer of 1948, they didn’t let that keep them from making the most of their time at camp. Dammie wrote to the parents that summer, “If you were here to witness it, you would be as proud of the morale in camp as we are. Naturally the departure of those seven campers was a little disturbing…On top of that we had a weekend deluge of 10 inches of rain. Everything in camp was soaked, the lake rose well above the surface of the dock, and for 36 hours it looked as though we’d never see the sun again. But even that couldn’t dampen the spirits of the campers…It’s a wonder you couldn’t hear their singing where you were Sunday. They pulled everything they could dream up…out of the song bag, and the…lung power they put into the renditions was positively overpowering!”
Looking back at this past summer of 2021, we feel similarly. Campers and counselors embraced the precautions put in place and kept the Merrie-Woode spirit alive. Dammie’s closing words of a letter to her campers’ parents in 1948 hold particular meaning to us this year. She said, “You can imagine…if you multiply your concern for your own child by 105, for that is the number of children for whom we feel the same immediate concern.” Camp is a bit bigger now. We multiply that number by over 200, but the sentiment remains the same. The summer of 2021 felt eerily similar to the summer of 1948 as we, like Dammie, looked to keep our Merrie-Woode girls safe through a global health crisis. The summer of 1948 closed without a case of polio in camp, as this past summer saw no cases of COVID at Merrie-Woode. But both summers will forever be remembered as moments in our history when camp became a truly isolated community, and by doing so provided its campers with a refuge away from rising infection rates and fears of a society in crisis.
Read letters from the CMW Archives, written by Dammie Day during the polio epidemic of 1948, below.
The post From the Archives: Camping Days During the 1940s Polio Epidemic appeared first on Camp Merrie-Woode | NC Girls Summer Camp.