Dubuque Summer Camp Retro T-Shirt

This design is one-of-a-kind and found only at Dubuque Clothing Co. — the Dubuque Summer Camp Retro T-Shirt is printed on a premium tee using high-quality, soft inks built to last through every summer to come.

Summer camp as we know it traces back to one very ambitious school trip. In 1861, Frederick W. Gunn, an abolitionist and headmaster of the Frederick Gunn School in Washington, Connecticut, led about 30 boys and a dozen girls on a 30-mile trek to Welch's Point on Long Island Sound in what was then called "gipsying." The 10-day outing mixed boating, fishing, and military drills with education and character-building, right as Civil War tensions were rising across the country — a combination the American Camp Association credits as the very thing that made it the first true summer camp. Gunn ran successful follow-up trips in 1863 and 1865, then established a permanent summer gathering spot at Point Beautiful on Lake Waramaug that ran every year from 1867 to 1879. The idea caught on fast: by the 1880s camps were popping up across the Northeast, including Joseph Rothrock's North Mountain School of Physical Culture in 1876 and Camp Chocorua in New Hampshire in 1881, with the YMCA and other groups soon offering fresh-air getaways to kids everywhere, especially those growing up in crowded cities.

Reference: The Origins of American Summer Camp - HISTORY