Camp Misty Mount: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Catoctin Mountain Park, National Park Service

Earley, Judith; Weldon, Daniel

Camp Misty Mount is a cabin camp, originally called an “organized group camp,” one of about a 100 such camps built by the NPS during the New Deal of the 1930s as part of what were termed “recreational demonstration areas” (RDAs). It is located within Catoctin Mountain Park, in the mountains on the western edge of Maryland’s Piedmont region. Called Organized Group Camp 1-C when built, it was the first of three group camps built in the Catoctin RDA. It opened in 1937 and was followed in 1938-39 by two other camps. Recreational demonstration areas were a type of project a part of the continuing response by the Roosevelt Administration to the social and economic crisis of the Great Depression, specifically in connection with agricultural reform. The NPS proposed to develop recreational demonstration areas on unproductive farmland to serve urban areas. Chief among the RDA facilities to be built were organized group camps, or “summer camps.” Camp Misty Mount had no defined boundaries; it blended into the larger park landscape and still does. Camp Misty Mount was designed as a children's camp and was built on a typical unit plan that meant that that camp was divided into “satellites” around a central core. Each unit was comprised of sleeping cabins, a lodge and a latrine. The central core of buildings connected by footpaths was made up of a dining room, staff quarters, camp office, infirmary, central wash, an activity building and equipment storage. A pool was built since swimming was such an important camp activity. The RDAs, like all the park work carried out during the 1930s by relief workers, were built in the rustic style. Camp Misty Mount was built by local WPA relief workers. In 1942, the park closed and it was transferred to the armed forces for an unspecified term of years. During that time the camp was winterized by glazing or blocking up windows, adding heaters, putting up wall boards and ceilings, and other actions. Most notable of the wartime changes, the third camp was transformed to become a retreat for President Roosevelt. After the war, Camps Misty Mount and Greentop reopened. Camp Misty Mount was listed on the National Register in 1989, with significance under Criterion A for its being representative of the efforts of the New Deal, and Criterion C, related to NPS-sponsored rustic architecture. The period of significance is given as 1934-1938. It is also part of a separate multiple property listing under the theme “Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) Architecture at Catoctin Mountain Park.” Overall, Camp Misty Mount has remained largely intact. It lost three of its historic buildings: the central wash house and two latrines, but 35 others remain, including the distinctive dining hall and three lodges. It is no longer as rustic a camp as it once was: electricity has been extended to all buildings and the windows are glazed. It is now on a main sewer line operated by the City of Thurmont, rather than using a septic field. Water is no longer pumped uphill from Hunting Creek, but drawn from deep wells, and stored in an underground tank. It is gravity-fed through the camp as before. The entrance road and circulation route between the units are in their original locations. The circulation route may have been a pre-existing feature – a woods road or charcoal sled road – in use before the camp was built. It was a foot path in the original design of the camp, and was widened and made into a gravel-surfaced, all-purpose road by the 1950s, if not earlier by its military occupants in the 1940s.

Camp Misty Mount: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Catoctin Mountain Park, National Park Service

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