Here is a post sent to us by Bill Horne one of our newest WCA members. Bill spent summers at Camp Woodland from 1950 to 1960. Thanks for sharing your memories with us Bill!
Folk Festival of the Catskills at the Simpson Memorial Ski Slope
"The photo shows Norman Studer, director of Camp Woodland, introducing Nellie Bly Ballard at the 1960 Folk Festival of the Catskills held at the base of the Simpson Memorial Ski Slope. The ski slope is located at the beginning of the Woodland Valley Road. The Folk Festival, held each August, featured the creative works of many Catskill residents. The audience sat on benches around a stage and on the ascending ski slope which is now somewhat overgrown. In the background is a row of poplars that lined the boundary of the ski slope and the Woodland Valley Road.
Using the camp as a base, campers went on frequent trips into the Catskill mountain communities to collect folk songs, stories and history. Many of these Catskill residents were born between 1870 and 1900 and had grown to adulthood during the transition from the age of homespun to industrialization. They were the last generation brought up to handle a flail, shape a wooden spoon, skim milk by hand from a flat pan. They had learned a way of life from parents who had been adults during the Civil War and from grandparents who had been alive in the 1840s when the age of homespun had reached its apogee in small-town New York.
By the time campers came to know them, their older pattern of living had largely been displaced and pushed into a dimly remembered past. Most lived on marginal farms or in little villages in narrow upland valleys or on mountain slopes. Often they were the third generation on their land. Their own children and grandchildren had hurried off to the cities to find work. And when these folks could no longer till the land by themselves, they watched it grow over with uncut grasses, with red sumac, and eventually with trees.
But their deep-lying roots in their culture gave these people an unmistakable dignity and serenity, even in the face of aging, sickness, and for some, long-inured poverty and despite their recognition that life had already passed them by and progress had rendered obsolete what they were familiar with. They retained a natural self-esteem of those whose American identity developed in an era when men and woman relied on themselves for many of the necessaries of daily life; and who, in the age of homespun, found opportunities to exercise their creative potential.
Campers appreciated the importance of these songs and stories to their Catskill neighbors. In the process of collecting them, these neighbors responded warmly to the eagerness and respect of the campers who came to learn from them. They sang and told stories cheerfully and graciously for their new found friends and appreciated the tribute of having their songs honored and enjoyed, and learned and sung back to them by a new generation."
- Submitted by Bill Horne, former resident of the Woodland Valley at Camp Woodland.
