Camp Wyonegonic, Denmark

Image courtesy Penobscot Marine Museum

The Camp Wyonegonic flotilla graces Moose Pond, beneath Pleasant Mountain. The camp (originally located on Highland Lake in Bridgton) was founded in 1902 by the Hobbs family and is today the oldest continuously operated camp for girls in the nation. (Camp Winona, for boys, farther up the shore of Moose Pond, was founded by the Hobbses in 1908.) The proliferation of camps for boys and girls beginning in the early 1900s provided canoe builders with a welcome important market, the amusement park canoe craze having cooled off with the replacement of the livery canoe (for young couples’ canoodling) by the back seat of the automobile.

Camp Wyonegonic’s grand fleet features what appears to be a 34-foot Old Town war canoe with one adult and 22 paddlers aboard, double-ended guideboats, and two sailboats of inland lake heritage and pre-World War II Vintage. It seems likely that this photo dates from the 1930s.

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This photo is from the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company Collection at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, and is included in its publication “Maine on Glass: The Early Twentieth Century in Glass Plate Photography,” by W.H. Bunting, Kevin Johnson and Earle Shettleworth Jr. You can find more about the museum and its collections at penobscotmarinemuseum.org.