Camp Merriam, an African American girls’ camp operated by the Phillis Wheatley Association (PWA) in Cleveland, was originally located on a well-wooded site along the Rocky River in the present-day Rocky River Reservation. The camp’s namesake was Mrs. Walter H. Merriam, a former president of both the YWCA and PWA. Merriam was a Quaker educated at Oberlin College, Cleveland Medical College, and the College of Wooster’s department of medicine who married a prominent Cleveland physician but never practiced medicine herself. Instead, she was civically active in leadership roles in not only the YWCA and PWA but also the Travelers Aid Society and Cleveland Welfare Federation.
An article by Mabel G. Harris that appeared in The Southern Workman in 1921 provides ample detail about the camp at this original site. According to Harris’s account, the camp’s centerpiece was a “40×20 shack” that was surrounded by tents. The girls enjoyed exploring the creek with its mussels, toads, and snakes, long hikes through the woods, picnicking, picking wild berries, swimming and boat rides, baseball games, tennis matches on a “rough patch of land just in front of the shack.” Harris also described reciprocal “stunt programs” in which the otherwise segregated campers at the YWCA Westside Branch camp and Camp Merriam (located on opposite sides of the Rocky River) took turns entertaining each other on successive nights around a campfire.
The campers also engaged in gardening on a one-acre plot, growing sufficient crops of “string beans, beets, lettuce, radishes, lima beans, mustard greens, tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, and corn” to feed both themselves and the YWCA campers. It is not clear whether only the Black campers performed garden labor. When the sweet corn was harvested, the girls roasted ears of corn over an open fire outside the shack. Harris observed that a Howard University student brought water and other provisions to the camp in his “flivver” (car).
In 1924, Camp Merriam operated for one summer in Parma before moving to a bluff overlooking Lake Erie near On-Erie Beach at Lorain, Ohio. According to the Hackley & Harrison’s Hotel and Apartment Guide for Colored Travelers (1930), the new camp was located at Stop 110 along West Erie Avenue rather than at 110 W. Erie as noted in later Green Book editions. Stop 110 was on the Lake Shore Electric Railway, an interurban line. This second Camp Merriam included a recreation hall, dining hall, and tents, as well as a tennis court and archery range. As they had at the Rocky River site, campers ate vegetables grown in the camp’s own garden. The camp operated until Camp Mueller in the Cuyahoga Valley replaced it in 1940. It is not known why the camp appeared in the Green Book. Perhaps visitors could stay and use its facilities when the camp was not in session.
Green Book Details
Camp Merriam appears in the 1939 and 1940 Green Book at 110 W. Erie Ave. under the category Tourist Homes.
Resources
- “Activities of Clubs.” Cleveland Plain Dealer. May 13, 1923.
- Glasier, Jessie C. “Start Drive for Wheatley Memberships.” Cleveland Plain Dealer. August 20, 1923.
- Hackley & Harrison’s Hotel and Apartment Guide for Colored Travelers. Philadelphia: Hackley & Harrison Publishing Co., 1930. New York Public Library.
- Harris, Mabel G. “The Phyllis Wheatley Summer Camp.” The Southern Workman 50, no. 12 (December 1921): 551–56. Google Books.
- “Mrs. Merriam, 76, Dies in California.” Cleveland Plain Dealer. March 25, 1943.
- “Notes of Clubs.” Cleveland Plain Dealer. June 15, 1924.
- “Wheatley Camp Ready.” Cleveland Plain Dealer. July 1, 1928.
- “With Lively Campers at Phillis Wheatley Resort.” Call & Post. July 20, 1939.