The Friendly Inn Camp, located in Sagamore Hills, Ohio, was an organized sleepaway summer camp operated by the Friendly Inn social settlement house. Located twenty miles southeast of Cleveland, the Friendly Inn Camp was situated on the 1,000-acre Summit County estate of Cleveland pharmacy tycoon Wentworth Goodson Marshall. In 1917, Marshall donated fifty acres of his rural summer estate to the Friendly Inn and established a summer camp for the settlement’s children. When it first opened, the Friendly Inn Camp provided low-cost summer camp vacations to the children of recent European immigrants living in Cleveland’s Haymarket district. After the Friendly Inn settlement relocated to Cleveland’s predominantly African American Central neighborhood in 1920s, the Friendly Inn Camp adopted an explicitly interracial operational policy and welcomed African American campers as equals. From the mid-1920s through the 1950s, the Friendly Inn Camp challenged broader systems of racial inequality, discrimination, and segregation while providing African American children in Cleveland access to the recreational, educational, and social benefits of organized summer camping.
In its early years, the Friendly Inn Camp’s purpose was primarily recreational. Drawing inspiration from the Fresh Air movement and the growth of organized camping nationwide after World War I, the Friendly Inn Camp was initially created to provide children living in Cleveland’s impoverished Haymarket district with summertime opportunities for contact with nature in the rural countryside. Camp staff believed that the rural camp environment – far removed from the industrial-era city – would help to eliminate a variety of social problems associated with urban childhood. Influenced by the Progressive-era ethos of “learning by doing,” staff organized camp programs and activities to encourage campers’ recreational acculturation to middle-class social values. By providing children with opportunities to engage in outdoor activities designed to improve health and build character, the Friendly Inn Camp worked to facilitate the Americanization of its young campers.
For twelve days at a time, campers would depart the Friendly Inn settlement for the rural countryside in Sagamore Hills. During the summer months between June and August, the Friendly Inn Camp hosted five successive camping sessions open to children between 5 and 15 years old. The camp’s facilities were sparse during its first few years of operation, consisting only of a dormitory building for campers, a small cabin for camp staff, and a series of makeshift tents for camp activities. The camp’s proximity to the Marshall estate, however, provided campers with easy access to Marshall’s Rocky Run Farm and Rocky Run Arboretum. Marshall, an avid naturalist, also granted campers access to the many miles of nature trails, hiking paths, and landscaped gardens located throughout his estate. Camp programming prioritized interaction with the natural world and took advantage of the estate’s outdoor amenities. Campers engaged in a variety of individual and group activities – including arts, crafts, cooking, gardening, hiking, swimming, sports, and more. By 1921, the camp’s popularity prompted Marshall to construct an additional open-air dormitory building that increased the camp’s capacity to between 60-70 campers per session. In later years, tent cabins were also used to house campers in closer proximity to the outdoors. On average, the Friendly Inn Camp hosted approximately three hundred campers each summer.
After relocating from the Haymarket to Cleveland’s Central neighborhood in 1924, the Friendly Inn settlement began to operate as an explicitly interracial institution in response to the racial demographic transition of its membership. The Friendly Inn Camp, by extension, welcomed African American children to enjoy its racially integrated facilities and interracial programming. Under the guidance of the camp’s interracial staff, campers from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds interacted, lived, learned, worked, and played together. Though recreation remained an important part of camp life, camp staff began to place a greater emphasis on the educational potential of organized camping by the mid-to-late 1920s. Recognizing the instructive potential of the interracial camp environment as a model for racial integration in action, the Friendly Inn Camp actively challenged systems of racial inequality and segregation prevalent in broader society. Camp activities frequently stressed the importance of racial tolerance and cross-cultural understanding, and camp staff addressed instances of racial conflict with educational lessons on topics of discrimination, integration, and racial equality. Throughout the 1920s, the Friendly Inn Camp worked to bridge racial and cultural divides between campers while promoting the ideal of racial harmony through interracial interaction and education.
Into the 1930s and 1940s, the Friendly Inn Camp continued to offer African American children from Cleveland’s Central neighborhood unprecedented access to camp-based summertime recreational and educational opportunities. After economic and social threats posed by the Great Depression and World War II led many to worry about the future of American democracy, the camp’s purpose again transitioned as camp staff began to place a greater emphasis on the value of democratic living. Camp staff highlighted the interracial camp environment’s power to not only shape children’s present and future lives through recreation and education, but to mold the nation’s youth into future vanguards of democracy through experience in living democratically. Unlike the majority of other racially segregated summer camps in operation, the interracial Friendly Inn Camp explicitly linked racial equality and the ideal of interracial harmony to the future of American democracy. Through camp-based recreational and educational forays in democratic living, the Friendly Inn Camp worked to break down existing racial barriers in the present while encouraging campers of all races to dismantle systems of intolerance and inequality in the future.
For nearly 40 years, the Friendly Inn Camp provided underprivileged youth in Cleveland with a rare example of racial integration in action. Though the Friendly Inn Camp closed in the 1950s, the Friendly Inn settlement has since continued to provide a wide array of recreational and educational opportunities for African American children in Cleveland (including at Camp Cleveland). Over a decade after the Friendly Inn Camp closed, the Marshall estate was partially redeveloped into the present-day Greenwood Village community. 518 acres of the former Marshall estate were later obtained by the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Today, several extant amenities once enjoyed by Friendly Inn campers, including Marshall Lake, a Boy Scout cabin, and several hiking and carriage trails, have been preserved as part of Greenwood Village and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Sagamore Hills.
Resources
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- Bing, Lucia Johnson. Social Work in Greater Cleveland: How Public and Private Agencies are Serving Human Needs. Cleveland: Welfare Federation of Cleveland, 1938.
- “Campfire Highlights Friendly Inn Camp.” Call and Post. August 5, 1944.
- “Central Friendly Inn at Northfield.” Plain Dealer. July 10, 1921.
- Cuyahoga Valley Trails Council. “Old Carriage Trail.” In Trail Guide to Cuyahoga Valley National Park, 3rd ed. Cleveland: Gray & Company, 2007. Pp. 136-138.
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- “Friendly Inn…..” Call and Post. July 5, 1941.
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- “Marshall Drug Co. Head is Naturalist.” Plain Dealer. March 4, 1923.
- Morrow, Juanita. “12,982 Negro Children Will Be Idle In Cleveland This Summer As Racial Bans Exist in Camps.” Call and Post. May 19, 1945.
- “Opens New Building at Friendly Inn Farm.” Plain Dealer. June 23, 1921.
- Paris, Leslie. Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
- Reed, Margaret Suhr. “Friendly Inn Camps Teach Nature Lore.” Plain Dealer. August 5, 1939.
- Shearer, Tobin Miller. Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.
- Smith, Michael B. “‘The Ego Ideal of the Good Camper’ and the Nature of Summer Camp.” Environmental History 11, no.1 (2006): pp. 70-101.
- “Vacation Days Open at Marshall Farm.” Plain Dealer. July 1, 1917.
My mother’s family lived across the street from the Friendly Inn Camp in Sagamore Hills. Their address was 7189 Holzhauer Road. My grandmother, Ann Burgenson, was a cook there during the depression.
The camp was later used as a Camp Fire Girls day camp, and even later for 4H club activities.
It is now the location of a private home, and is part of the Cuyahoga National Park.