Camp Bovey: Giving kids a chance to grow for 75 years

“I am a Hodagger, I walk with a swagger” 

Generations of Northeast kids have sung that song over the past 75 years. If you attended Camp Bovey, you know it well.

The camp, situated in northwestern Wisconsin, has been owned and operated by East Side Neighborhood Services since 1949, but its history goes back just a little bit further.

In 1939, Lester Scheaffer was a cabin counselor at a private boys’ camp near Gordon, Wis., called Camp Nebagamon. Austrian-born Max “Muggs” Lorber of St. Louis, Mo., owned the camp. 

During the summers of 1940 and 1941, after World War II started, Lorber sensed that the boys in his camp, who came from well-to-do families, were restless. They were too young to go to war and too young to work in the industrial plants that supplied the war effort. He decided to put them to work building a camp for children who were less privileged.

Lorber’s campers labored for six years to build Camp Hodag on the shores of 13-acre Lake Metzger, erecting sleeping cabins, a storage building and an icehouse. The camp was named after a mythical beast with the head of an ox, back of dinosaur, tail of an alligator and feet of a bear. The Hodag looked out for the lumberjacks and loggers in the area.

By 1949, Lorber figured it was time to turn the camp over to an organization that served underprivileged kids. By chance, he bumped into Scheaffer, his former camp counselor, at an American Camping Association convention in Minneapolis. Scheaffer had just taken the reins as executive director of Northeast Neighborhood House. Lorber asked if NENH had a camp, and if not, did Scheaffer want one?

Scheaffer, recalling his days at Camp Nebagamon, was thrilled. He arranged a meeting of NENH’s Board of Directors, where Lorber showed a movie of the camp and made his offer.

“It was practically a gift that he was giving,” Scheaffer told Joe Holewa in an interview. “He told the board that he was ready to turn over 200 acres of property, which included the lake, four sleeping cabins, the bunkhouse, an icehouse, the log kitchen-dining cabin and two privies. In addition, there were three canoes and a rowboat, beds and mattresses for 18 campers, dishes, pots and pans, four tables and a woodburning cookstove.”

All NENH had to do was come up with $6,000, and NENH would receive $5,000 from a trust fund for building a new dining hall. Board members were reluctant. Camp Hodag was 150 miles away from NENH. What if the camp was not a success? Would they be stuck with it?

Finally, board member Kate Bovey, one of NENH’s founders and its first board president, politely put her foot down. The wife of Charles Cranston Bovey, one of the directors of General Mills, she had given NENH substantial financial support since 1914. According to Scheaffer, she said, “Gentlemen, let us stop quibbling. We have wanted a camp for many years and now we have a great opportunity. I move that we buy this camp, and I will contribute half the cost and find friends to give the other half.”

Within a week, Scheaffer recalled, the $6,000 was in the NENH bank account, and Max Lorber turned over the trust fund money for the new dining hall. The camp was dedicated and named for “Mrs. Bovey” in 1951.

The first year, 95 kids from Northeast Minneapolis spent a week in northern Wisconsin.

Through the years, Camp Bovey underwent several improvements. Tearing down the old dining hall was Joe Holewa’s first assignment. Holewa, who went on to be a Camp Bovey director and later became executive director of ESNS, recalled the fall of 1950 in a conversation with Scheaffer. “You took me up to see Camp Hodag, soon to be called Camp Bovey. It certainly was quiet and beautiful that sunny September day. You pointed out the old Metzger log cabin, which was in poor condition, and said, ‘We’re going to have a new dining hall next summer. Could you and some of your old Northeast friends tear down the old cabin to make room for the new one?’

“Two weeks later eight of us went up for the weekend and did the job. It was hard work, but we had a lot of fun doing it, joking and singing as we swung the sledge and piled up the old logs. That was a great introduction to camp.”

Electricity was brought into the camp, and the icehouse was replaced with a refrigerator/freezer in a two-story dining hall/kitchen/handicraft room. It was named for Paul Treuman, Jr., a Nebagamon camper who died in an auto accident and whose $5,000 insurance payment became the trust fund that paid for the hall.

Outhouses were replaced by a latrine with flush toilets. In the 1980s, the original cabins built by the boys from Camp Nebagamon were replaced with new A-frame cabins.

Camp Bovey received assistance from outside organizations, too. The Northeast Lions Club built the Carol Jalma Craft Cabin. A group of ten volunteers from the North East Golden K Club built benches for the dining hall. For several years, the Biernat Brothers sponsored a golf tournament that directed its proceeds to the camp.

But Camp Bovey is about more than log cabins. It’s about kids experiencing the outdoors in a new way. 

Kathy Jurichko spent four summers at Camp Bovey before becoming camp director in 1995. She served 12 years in that capacity. “The camp experience has always been to get kids outdoors,” she said. “East Side always worked hard to get money so camp could be affordable. We worked to get scholarships for families who might not go on a summer vacation, so their kids could swim in a freshwater lake, see the stars, take a hike and make friends.”

She continued, “We started with kids in Northeast and Southeast Minneapolis, then included the Glendale housing area in the Prospect Park neighborhood.” (ESNS has programs at Luxton Park.) Now children and families from Columbia Heights and St. Anthony attend the summer camps as well.

Jurichko said the camp has become more diverse. “The first diversification was probably when we started inviting girls to camp.” She said camp is a “great equalizer. We have kids from different ethnic backgrounds, various economic statuses. At camp, everybody’s in shorts and a T-shirt. Just kids with similar needs.”

Camp Bovey is about passing along traditions, too, such as recounting the legend of the Hodag at an evening campfire. Each storyteller adds their own embellishments to the story, which begins with a lumberjack named Ole Swenson and his fellow loggers who defeat a “mean boss man” with the help of the mysterious creature, the Hodag, who turns out to be less fearsome than they thought.

Jurichko said another tradition was started by her predecessor, Mark Youngdale: the Leadership in Training program. Camp Bovey is for kids 8-14. When they “graduate” from the program, camp leaders take aside those with budding leadership skills and ask them if they’d like to volunteer at the camp, assisting with hikes, swimming and arts and crafts. “They come back at age 15 and attend a spring leadership program that teaches them how to work with young kids as volunteers. Many come back year after year until they’re 18 and want to be hired as camp staff.

In 1952, Minneapolis Tribune columnist George Grimm wrote, “When ‘Mugs’ [sic] Lorber sold that camp at cost to the charitable organization, he had written into the contract that no one ever should be excluded because of race, religion or color, and that it should attract an economic group that couldn’t otherwise go to camp. If the camp ever is sold, it cannot be priced at more than the purchase price, plus capital expenditures put into it.

“The only ones to profit, you see, are those deserving campers who exchange the hot city’s streets of summer for the cool wonder of a northern lake.”

This summer, Camp Bovey will offer three weeks of camping experiences, two for ESNS program participants and one that’s open to the entire community. See https://www.esns.org/campbovey for details. A dance and fundraiser for the camp, Beats for Bovey, will be held Saturday, June 15, in the ESNS parking lot.

Sources: 

Jurichko, Kathy, “Camp Bovey, a 50-year Scrapbook,” East Side Neighborhood Services, 1999

Arnold, Caroline Scheaffer, “Settlement House Girl,” 2023

Ancestry.com

“Mrs. Charles C. Bovey, Civic Leader, Dies at 90,” Minneapolis Star, July 17, 1964

Grimm, George, “I Like It Here: Contributed Work Builds Camp for City Children,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 2, 1952

Camp remembered

In a 2008 obituary for Joe Holewa, former camper Dennis Mickelson remembered, “I went to Camp Bovey a few times. My folks could afford the full $20 price to attend, but many only paid what their family could. I still remember those camp days as if they were yesterday. I caught my first bass, paddled a canoe for the first time, camped out overnight, and cleaned the outhouse as part of the daily camp work after breakfast.”

Caroline Scheaffer Arnold, Les Scheaffer’s daughter, recalled in her book, “Settlement House Girl,” “There were a number of ‘tests’ to be passed at camp. One was the boat test. Another was the canoe test. (For both tests one had to be able to distinguish port from starboard and bow from stern.) … Boats often meant going fishing, and in the early days of the camp the fish were so plentiful they practically jumped into the boat by themselves. We mostly caught sunfish and perch although sometimes we took turns trolling for bass.”

Mike Brinda, who attended Camp Bovey from 1954-1956, said, “For me, Camp provided father figures, learning to appreciate nature, camping, canoeing and swimming. Even as an adult I would return to Gordon to canoe the Brule River and fish for trout. The lessons learned at Camp were passed on to our children and grandchildren.”