Western North Carolina has always been a place of beauty, with its small-town communities, pleasant climate, and rolling Blue Ridge Mountains. By the 1920s, this area had become a genuine center of the youth camping movement, quickly becoming home to the largest concentration of summer camps in the southeastern United States. With so many camps, there’s an interesting story to be told, and now a new digital exhibit tells us that story, and a great deal more.
The Cashiers Historical Society has just published a wonderful, carefully curated online exhibit called “Campfires & the Embers of Youth.” It sets out to explain how summer camps in western North Carolina shaped young people in America, educational trends, and regional NC culture for more than a hundred years.
Gathering an incredible collection of documents, photographs, audio and video clips, and artifacts, it paints a detailed picture of why the mountains here became central to the growing summer camp movement in America. The exhibit traces the origin of organized youth camping to 19th-century social changes: urbanization, evolving ideas about childhood and development, a growing distrust of formal schooling, the rise of child psychology, and generally as a response to the anxieties of modern life.
Where Rockbrook Fits In
The exhibit moves from origins through evolutions, culture, and daily life. It’s very informative and fun to see how Rockbrook appears throughout all of it. For example, Rockbrook’s archive of original song recordings is one of the exhibit’s richest resources. On the Camp Culture and Camp Life pages, you’ll hear “Way Down in Brevard,” the “Rockbrook Pep Song,” “Hiking Song,” “Canoeing Song,” “Are You a Camel,” and others. There is also a 1960 camper’s quote about the Spirit Fire, photographs from the 1930s and 1950s, and a 1920s camping magazine describing horseback rides through Toxaway and Sapphire.
Rockbrook’s founder, Nancy Carrier, is featured. In the women’s movement section, a photograph shows her proudly gathered with a sign reading “Votes for Women,” and another from the 1930 edition of Camps and Camping Magazine shows her listed as Vice President of the national Camp Directors Association. In the WWII section, the exhibit notes that Nancy closed Rockbrook during the war to support the war effort, and opened her home to a Brevard community group sewing bandages for troops.
The exhibit is honest about camping’s complexities, too. It acknowledges that early camps mainly served middle- and upper-class white Protestant boys, and traces the long, uneven expansion toward girls, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities. It describes camps as insular “small worlds” with their own rules and traditions, with both positive and challenging consequences.
The exhibit received a 2025 GDUSA American Inhouse Design Award, and the care in its production shows. It’s organized around five main sections: Camp Origins, Camp Evolutions, Camp Culture, Camp Life, and a Museum Gallery. It’s beautifully rich, and you can spend a few minutes or easily an hour following threads or just listening to the songs.
I hope you’ll take some time and visit “Campfires & the Embers of Youth.” What you’ll find is the broader history of Rockbrook, and how it and other camps in western NC have made a difference in so many lives.
