OTISFIELD — For many years, the boys of Great Oaks Camp on Saturday Pond would walk to East Otisfield Baptist Church on Rayville Road on Sunday to take turns ringing the bell.

In 1987, the summer youth camp closed after 60 years of operation. Founder Joseph Becker cited escalating insurance costs and more state regulations as reasons.

“It was a nice camp,” Ethel Blow said in a 1987 Lewiston Daily Sun article on the camp’s closure. “It’s a sad commentary on a way of life in Maine. So many of the children’s camps are closing.”

Blow was chairwoman of the Board of Selectmen at the time.

Otisfield once boasted many summer camps and during this past year, the Otisfield Historical Society has concentrated on documenting those on Pleasant Lake from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

On Thursday, June 19, the Otisfield Historical Society will present a program on the history of summer camps on Pleasant Lake. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. and includes a PowerPoint presentation by society members Ethel Turner and Jean Hankins. It will be held at the society headquarters at the Old Town House at 53 Bell Hill Road. The program is free and open to the public.

Camps with names such as Kamp Kiwassa, Camp Powhatan, Camp Arcadia, Camp Tall Timbers, Pleasant Lake Camp for Jewish Boys and Seeds of Peace International Camp are among those documented this past winter by Turner and Hankins through interviews, deed research and other means.

Members of the society interviewed Otisfield residents who worked at the camps which were on five sites next to the  lake. They also talked to several individuals who attended the camps or served as counselors, often for several years, and to family members of the camps’ founders.

Turner and Hankins said they did extensive deed research, pored over town assessment records and studied published accounts of the youth camping movement in the United States. They also collected a large number of photos which show the camping experience.

According to Turner and Hankins, the first organized camp on Pleasant Lake was Kamp Kiwassa, founded about 1906 by Anton Schatzel, who was at one time director of the Portland YMCA.

Kiwassa was designed not for children but for business and professional men, their wives and families. The camp operated only a few years. It was on land later occupied by Camp Powhatan, which is now Seeds of Peace International Camp.

ldixon@sunjournal.com

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