83 years of magical memories at Camp Cleawox

“It’s a magical place and it has a long history.”

Marissa Bennett’s comment about Camp Cleawox, the 83-year-old Girl Scout camp next to Honeyman State Park just south of Florence, sums it up pretty well.

Opened in 1929, a quarter-century before nearby Camp Baker for the Boy Scouts opened, the 42-acre camp is one of the oldest Girl Scout camps on the West Coast, said Bennett, the resident camp and outdoor program manager in the Portland office of Girl Scouts of Oregon and Southwest Washington.

“Camp is one of the best things that can happen to a kid,” Bennett said. “It is the ideal place for leadership and friendship for girls in Lane County.”

The camp is open year-round, but of course gets its heaviest use in the summertime.

That is where young girls ages 5 to 18 go to learn how to work in groups and become future leaders in whatever endeavor they choose, Bennett said. Where they go to make friends they’ll never forget.

“I remember those girls to this day,” said Katie Lytle of Eugene, a longtime Girl Scout volunteer who first experienced Camp Cleawox as a 13-year-old Girl Scout in the summer of 1944.

“I probably wouldn’t recognize them now, walking down the street, but I remember them and the songs we sang. It was a wonderful time.”

In fact, Lytle, who returned to the camp 30 years later, in the mid-1970s, to become a volunteer when her daughter became a Girl Scout, still has both her Camp Cleawox song books from the summers of 1944 and 1945.

The one from the summer of ’44 is filled with the signatures of the friends she made, including their camp nicknames: Tigger, Splash, Sketch, Skeeter, Jib, Paddles, Tug Boat, Ponto, Wing, Skipper, Cake and Cookie, among others.

Many of the nicknames are, of course, water-related as girls back then, and as they still do each and every summer, experienced the joys of Cleawox Lake, whether swimming or canoeing or waterskiing.

“It was wonderful, and the weather was good,” is how Lytle remembered her first glimpse of the lake, and of crossing it in a rowboat for the first time to get to the camp.

When it opened, two weeks at camp cost a girl $7. Lytle remembered it being $8 a week when she went.

Today, a week at the camp costs between $380 and $1,095, depending on which program a girl and her family chooses, Bennett said. Financial assistance is available, she said.

Lytle also remembers sleeping in one of the three-sided Adirondack units and stuffing a denimlike bag with straw to use as a mattress.

“At the end of the week, you’d dump straw out and get ready for the next camper,” said Lytle, who still volunteers at the camp every summer.

And there was no shower house seven decades ago.

“You went down to the lake with your bar of soap and your towel,” Lytle said.

The Adirondacks and the original camp lodge were built by the Civil Conservation Corps, the federal public works relief program of the 1930s.

Much of the camp was damaged during the 1962 Columbus Day storm, which wreaked havoc across the Northwest with winds in excess of 100 mph.

A mid-1990s rebuilding brought new camping quarters and a new lodge with a modern kitchen, bathrooms and offices.

A week at camp is equal to a year in a Girl Scout troop in which you only meet an hour a week, Bennett said.

“So it’s everything fast,” she said. “And you learn how to be that person you want to become.”