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Pine Tree Camp Celebrates 65 Years of Service on North Pond

July 05, 2010 - ROME -- Sixty-five years ago, they made a scrapbook to chronicle the first summer of camp on the shores of North Pond.

The opening pages indicate that camp began July 2, 1945, with 75 Maine children being greeted with music and it lasted all summer long. Throughout the scrapbook are drawings, photos, news clippings, names of campers and counselors and lists of activities, songs and games from each day, and therapies.

Inside the scrapbook it is written: "We all learned things about ourselves we had never before knew existed."

This was no ordinary camp experience. It was, as described by a July 3, 1945, Waterville Morning Sentinel story, the first group of children to arrive at North Pond camps organized by the "Pine Tree Society for Crippled Children."

The 65-year-old scrapbook remains at the modern-day Pine Tree Camp in Rome, which serves children and adults with disabilities. This year, the book's yellowed but intact pages serve as a visible reminder of the camp's history as camp officials celebrate the 65th anniversary, while also attempt to reconnect with thousands of camp alumni and document their experiences.

"It's a huge, huge task," said Anne Marsh, executive director of the Pine Tree Society, the organization that runs the camp. "Think of all the people who have been touched over the years."

Pine Tree officials hope to reconnect with alumni -- campers and staff -- by holding a reunion on Aug. 8. Officials have been creating a Pine Tree Camp directory and are soliciting stories and experiencing through their website and on social-networking site Facebook. Some campers' narratives will be recorded on video and posted on YouTube.

Today, the Pine Tree Camp serves about 650 children and adults with disabilities who come for six-day sessions throughout the summer. Programs are the recreational kind you'd expect to find at summer camp -- swimming, fishing, kayaking, hiking, adaptive tennis, drama, arts and crafts -- and the camp has medical staff there all day and night to care for campers.

"It's much the same, what we still do," said Dawn Willard-Robinson, director of program management for the camp. "We still do archery, plays and skits and singing after every meal."

And yet the types of disabled campers has changed. Many of the first campers were victims of the Polio epidemic, Marsh said, while today they more commonly have autism or cerebral palsy.

Penny Plourde, 55, Vassalboro, says the Pine Tree Camp experience changed her life when she began attending in 1967. A 9-year-old from Fort Kent, she was born with spina bifida, a defection in which the spinal column doesn't fully form and "all the nerve endings are outside my body."

She eventually learned to walk, with large braces and now without any, but she is now in a wheelchair. Plourde recently retired as director of the Maine Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, a state agency.

Plourde said she has the camp to thank not only for recreational experiences and her only physical therapy each year as a child -- during two, four-week sessions -- but also for giving her a sense of belonging, confidence.

"As I became a young adult I realized I wanted to fit in with the fabric of the universe; I wanted to be like everybody else," she said. "At camp, I was able to do that. I was one of the campers, not one that stood out."

Plourde said she also met her dearest and oldest friend at camp, Deborah, and camp "really set in motion the vision that I could, therefore I did."

"It really enabled me to see that people with disabilities really want the same things as other people," she said. "It's the perception of the greater community that we are unable to live independently ... it's that perception that greatly slows the community of disabled people from excelling -- things they could do if given the opportunity."

by Scott Monroe, Kennebec Journal, July 5, 2010

Lakes: North Pond
Regions: Belgrade


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