LOUISVILLE, Ky. — July and August are prime months for summer vacations – that includes family trips, or summer camps for kids.
For our partnership with the Filson Historical Society, we are looking back at Louisville’s Fresh Air Homes, which offered people from the inner city a chance to get out into the country and get fresh air.
In the late 1800s, Louisville’s upper class went on summer trips to places like Maine or Michigan, for some cooler weather. However, it was harder for people who didn’t have the means to travel to get much needed fresh air.
“Not everybody could afford to take a trip out of town,” Filson Director of Collections Access Jennie Cole said.
Louisville’s downtown was hot, overcrowded and polluted, and it was hard to escape. Social welfare groups started to think of ways to help people who didn’t have the funds to take a vacation.
“They would get sick people, or poor people that would apply to the church, and they would take them for a day out in the countries,” Cole said.
It started out as a day trip to somewhere like Crestwood or Pewee Valley. These excursions then turned into two-week trips for kids. The Fourth Street Presbyterian Church ran the camps, until the Neighborhood House took the lead. But at the same time, the newspaper the Louisville Herald was also running a similar camp for mothers and babies.
The two merged into what became known as the Louisville Fresh Air Camp in 1911.
“What the children and mothers and babies would have done there would be to have a full week away from downtown on somewhat of a farm,” Cole said. “They’d get fresh milk, fresh vegetables, fresh eggs, fresh meat from the local community. A lot of it was actually donated.”
It was a chance for mothers to relax and kids to play, swim and ride horses. But for the people putting the camps on, there was a little more to it.
“There was also this sort of subtle undertone of teaching cleanliness, and how to care for your family,” Cole said. “There was definitely this upper-class idea of, we know how you should be doing things and you may not be doing it.”
The camp moved to a more permanent location in Pewee Valley in 1923, where it went on for decades. There isn’t much information about this camp past the 1950, when it seemingly trickled out.
“I think it's really it's an interesting summer story to think about, like what did the inner city people of Louisville do for the summer,” Cole said. “This is something that was sort of a charitable vacation.”
By the time the camps stopped, there were so many other camps available that people had options. The building in pewee valley eventually became home to the Little Colonel Players, a theater troupe that is still around today.
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