By Frances Stebbins
Frances Stebbins has been covering events in Western Virginia, especially those relating to faith communities, since 1953.
Maybe it was because the 1950s America was a time when many families included four or more children that camping in tents, travel trailers, even small mobile homes, became a popular way to vacation.
A doctor, who could certainly afford more but was the father of five, suggested that to me. Going to a public campground, such as a state park, or a private one with a few amenities such as flush toilets in the bath house, certainly cost less than accommodations in a motel.
Our family of five took all our summer vacations in a tent from 1963 to around 1975. We had some memorable adventures; one with no happy memories occurred in the wet summer of 1969 when, trying to find an inexpensive way to get Julia, Frank and Harvey to see the sights of our nation’s capital , Charlie and I chose to stay at a site near Fredericksburg.
It began raining as we left home at Hollins and ,with few interruptions, was still raining five days later. We never got to Washington. {A column I published on that trip a couple of years ago, got a lot of empathetic comments.}
Camping was not a part of my earlier life. Our family was introduced to it by my best friend of those years, the late Esther Holden. She invited us to try it out for a weekend at Philpott Lake south of Roanoke.
So we ordered equipment from a supply catalog. The major item was a huge yellow canvas tent roomy enough for us all to be bedded in the new sleeping bags. After a hard rain we learned that cots off a damp floor offered a bit more comfort.
We soon found that a camping trip was a lot of work. It fell to my patient husband to erect the tent, a hot and strenuous job involving lifting and snapping poles together. Then there was the portable stove fueled from a little tank of oil. I still use the plastic ice chest that was an essential part of the experience.
The children enjoyed the freedom to run around the campground with others .Our youngest child was still in training pants and required a potty chair. In time, we used our equipment mainly for a few days at Seashore State Park near Virginia’s extreme southeast corner which required a long day’s drive across the Commonwealth until some friends living in the Ocean View suburb offered us a place to spend the night.
If not at the ocean campground in Virginia, we’d go where so many from the Roanoke Valley went—Myrtle Beach , South Carolina. To our surprise upon moving to the Star City, we found it was actually easier and no further to reach the Atlantic by cutting across North Carolina and part of its sister state than to drive from west to east through agricultural Southside Virginia.
Well, years passed and the children grew up. Daughter Julia married and left for a permanent move to the Deep South. She and her husband Gary bought a more convenient pop-up wheeled camper which is drier in a rainstorm and goes in place more quickly.
By the 1980s our young adult sons had jobs, their sister had moved away,and, with one of my husband’s relatives, we shifted our beach vacations to rental of a cottage at Topsail Beach in North Carolina. For us, tent and trailer camping was over.
For us yes, but for two younger generations it has continued in a different style.
The memories remained for our daughter, for she and her Louisiana-born husband Gary have for years owned a vehicle that can be towed to a campground. When they had a daughter, they regularly drove from their Atlanta-area home to a campground on the Gulf Coast closer to Gary’s relatives.
Fast forward to 2022. With the retirement from restaurant management and other jobs, Gary now lives in a renovated mobile home parked in the Lakewood Family Campground in a suburb of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He enjoys having a part-time restaurant help- job in the busy season.It’s the same big campground in which we fought mosquitoes 45 years ago.
His wife, visiting back and forth until her full retirement from a Florida banking job, tells me that camping is still popular though most people use a wheeled vehicle. A real permanent community exists at Lakewood .
And now memories of childhood camping have caused my granddaughter Kellie and her husband Matthew to purchase a large mobile camper in which they can travel to motorcycle events with their two young sons. It’s become a family tradition, though long in my past.
