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ABSTRACT
The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a new but rapidly spreading perspective on the link between education and nature: middle-class philanthropists joining together to provide summer vacations in the countryside for poor, sickly, urban children. Drawing on numerous examples of such work in Europe and the United States, this essay highlights the common traits and local variations of these programmes designed to improve the physical health and often the moral tone of such endangered children. It highlights in particular the fundamental disagreements over whether it was better to house such children in the homes of rural families or to keep them together in groups under the supervision of teachers or other adults. In conclusion, it examines the important role of a single patron, the Prussian/German Crown Princess Victoria.
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Notes
1 Walter Shepard Ufford, Fresh Air Charity in the United States (New York: Bonnell, Silver, &. Co., 1897); W.T. Stead, “Country Holidays for Poor Children,” Review of Reviews 2, no. 9 (September 1890), 219–26; May [sic] Jeune, “The Poor Children’s Holiday,” Fortnightly Review 53 (June 1893), 846–55; Johannes Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien (Frankfurt am Main: Dr Eduard Schnapper, 1902). See also Luise Jessen, “Sommerpflege,” in Illustriertes Konversations-Lexikon der Frau, Rosalie Schoenfleiss and others, eds., 2 vols. (Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1900), 486–8.
2 Thilo Rauch, Die Ferienkolonienbewegung: Zur Geschichte der privaten Fürsorge im Kaiserreich (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1992); Laura Lee Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880–1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Hester Barron, “Changing Conceptions of the ‘Poor Child’: The Children’s Country Holiday Fund, 1918–1939,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, no. 1 (2016): 29–47; Julia Guarneri, “Changing Strategies for Child Welfare, Enduring Beliefs about Childhood: The Fresh Air Fund, 1877–1926,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 1 (2012): 27–70; Tobin Miller Shearer, Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). On the early years of the CCHF, see Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919).
3 Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 9, 46–54; and Downs, Childhood, 15, 20. Downs rechristens Bion as “Wilhelm”.
4 Walter Bion, Die Ferienkolonien und verwandte Bestrebungen auf dem Gebiete der Kinder-Gesundheitspflege (Zurich: Sekretariat der Züricher Ferienkolonien, 1901), esp. 159, 234–7. His information on the United States came almost completely from Ufford’s Fresh Air Charity. More modest comparative material exists in Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien, 20–4.
5 Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 157, 52; and Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 37–41.
6 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 179; Willard Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,” in The Poor in Great Cities: Their Problems and What is Being Done to Solve Them, ed. Robert Archer Woods (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), 131–50, here 149; Ufford, Fresh Air Charity, 17. Parsons’s article originally appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in April 1891. Lloyd Burgess Sharp echoed Parsons’s claim that the Fresh Air Fund “has been instrumental in starting similar activities in England, Scotland, and France”: see Sharp, Education and the Summer Camp (New York: Teachers College, 1930), 8; Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 32, n. 10, cites Sharp; and Shearer, Two Weeks, 17 and 183, n 21, cites Guarneri on this influence. Shearer also turns Copenhagen into a Dutch city and moves the origin of Boston’s Fresh Air Week to 1870: Two Weeks, 15–16.
7 Bion as cited in Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 49–50; Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J.M. Dent, 1983), 51–2; Bee Wilson, Swindled: the Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 158; Jesse Battershall, Food Adulteration and its Detection (New York: E. & F.N. Spon, 1887), 50; John Spargo, The Common Sense of the Milk Question (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 84; and Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Jungle Publishing, 1906).
8 Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 165, 172; and Sigrid Stöckel, Säuglingsfürsorge zwischen sozialer Hygiene und Eugenik: Das Beispiel Berlins im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 185.
9 Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 3; and Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 71–2.
10 For one statement of the general view that such concerns arose in Britain only with the South African War of 1898–1901, see Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture, and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 67, 98–9.
11 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 178; Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 31; and Ufford, Fresh Air Charity, 11.
12 Ufford, Fresh Air Charity, 11. He appeared to assume that Asian immigrants to the West Coast were unlikely to assimilate.
13 F. Norris, “A Note on a Good Work,” Macmillan’s Magazine 49 (February 1884): 310.
14 Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 50; Barron, “Changing Conceptions,” 32; Shearer, Two Weeks, 11–13; and Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 28.
15 Schoners Familienblatt, ed., In Luft und Sonne: Künstler- und Selbstschriften-Album (Berlin: J.H. Schoner, 1888); Mary Jeune, “Holidays for Poor Children,” The New Review 2, no. 12 (May 1890): 455–65, here 464. The German album contains hundreds of entries, including drawings and sketches, poems, and adages, submitted by members of most German royal houses, leading artists and writers, and notables such as General Helmut von Moltke.
16 Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 211; Meinolf Nitsch, Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine im Kaiserreich: Die praktische Umsetzung der Bürgerlichen Sozialreform in Berlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 112; year-by-year breakdowns in Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien, 71.
17 Leslie Paris, Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 3, 17–9, 189–93.
18 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund,” 133, 142.
19 Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 14, 195; Jessen, “Sommerpflege,” 488; Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 221; Nitsch, Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine, 133–4; Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien, 22. Luise Jessen, an important figure in Berlin’s organisation, noted that “milk cures”, “city colonies”, and “half colonies” were used interchangeably: “Űber Fereien-Kolonien,” in Rosalie Schoenflies et al., eds., Die internationale Kongress für Frauenwerke und Frauenbestrebungen in Berlin, 19. bis 26 September 1896 (Berlin: H. Walther, 1897), 250.
20 “Politics and Society,” Leeds Mercury, July 3, 1884, 5; “Children’s Country Holidays,” The British Medical Journal, no. 1425 (June 30, 1888), 1395; and Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,” 138.
21 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,” 143, 148.
22 Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 33, 64, 256; Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 91; Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 186; Nitsch, Private Wohltätigskeits-vereine, 13; and Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 46.
23 Rauch, Fereienkolonienbewegung, 43, 177; Ufford, Fresh Air Charity, 17; Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 41; Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 19–20, 27, 89; and Bion, Ferienkolonien, 188. Bergknecht indicates that by 1899, the city of Paris paid 70% of the costs of these school-linked colonies: Ferienkolonien, 22.
24 Amélie Sohr, Frauenarbeit in der Armen- und Krankenpflege, Daheim und im Auslande: Geschichtliches und kritisches (Berlin: J. Springer, 1882), 51–2; Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 187 et passim; Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien, 15n. For Varrentrapp’s many public health activities, see Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 39, 43, 56, 141. For a “Christmas market” to benefit the Frankfurt colonies, held in 1885 by local artists and others, see Norbert Schrödl and Elsa Schrödl, Ein Kunstlerleben im Sonnenschein (Frankfurt am Main: Englart and Schlösser, 1922), 313.
25 A.A. Strange-Butson, “Country Holidays for City Children,” Good Words 24 (December 1883), 262–3; and “Children’s Country Holidays,” The British Medical Journal, no. 1744 (June 2, 1894), 1204–5.
26 Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 52; Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 33; Benno Fromm, Die Wohltätigskeitsvereine in Berlin (Berlin: Vereins-Buchhandlung, 1894), 99; and Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 50.
27 Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 33 and n. 15; and Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 25.
28 Bion, Die Fereienkolonien, 136, 151, 167, 179.
29 “Appeal for the Poor Children of Leeds,” Leeds Mercury, June 12, 1885, 4; and Jeune, “Holidays for Poor Children,” 458.
30 Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 20, 27, 42.
31 Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 106; Jeune, “Holidays for Poor Children,” 462; and Shearer, Two Weeks, 23.
32 Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 52, 66; Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 123, 167; and Jessen, “Sommerpflege,” 487.
33 Fromm, Wohltätigkeitsvereine, 99; and Nitsch, Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine, 131.
34 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,” 135–6; Cyril Jackson, “The Children’s Country Holiday Fund and the Settlements,” in The Universities and the Social Problem: An Account of the University Settlements in East London, ed. John Knapp (London: Rivington, Percival, 1895), 87–105, here 91, 95. For the resistance to intrusion, except by district nurses, see especially Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16–8, 49. Ross does not mention the CCHF.
35 Elizabeth Rossiter, “Country Life for Poor Town Children,” Good Words 26 (December 1885), 357–9, quotation on 359. See also the obituary, W. Rossiter, “The Originator of ‘Country Life for Poor Town Children,’” Good Words 29 (December 1888), 702–3.
36 Jeune, “The Poor Children’s Holiday,” 850; C.S. Loch, “Children’s Country Holidays,” Times, September 10, 1896, 8; and Robert A. Woods, “The Social Awakening in London,” in The Poor in Great Cities, 12–13.
37 Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 102–3; and Ufford, Fresh Air Charity, 3–4, 97.
38 Jeune, “Holidays for Poor Children,” 460.
39 Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 93; Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 138, 194, 224; “Children’s Country Holidays,” The British Medical Journal, (June 29, 1895): 1460. The Spanish government rather than private philanthropists opened a large ocean-side colony, connected with a sanatorium, at Coruna in the early twentieth century: José Manuel Dominguez García, “El medio natural como entorno educativo: Las colonias escolares en el Sanatorio de Oza” (paper presented at ISCHE 40, Berlin, August 2018).
40 Jessen, “Sommerpflege,” 488; and Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien, 39 and 39n. Berlin at least discussed such a programme in 1900.
41 Barnett, Canon Barnett, 180; Barron, “Changing Conceptions,” 34, 38–9; and Shearer, Two Weeks, 101–3.
42 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,” 137; Jeune, “Holidays for Children,” 459; and Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 51.
43 Bion, Die Ferienkolonien, 11, 16, 116, 122; and Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, 35–6, 60–3, 65.
44 Ufford, Fresh Air Charity, 39, 49; Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,” 148; Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 50, 59. For the later period examined by Shearer, Two Weeks, 5, the “overwhelming majority of the children stayed in homes rather than camps”.
45 Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien, 15, 63, 37–9; Jessen, “Űber Ferien-Kolonien,” 250; Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 223, 191 221; and Nitsch, Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine, 132–3.
46 Norris, “Note on a Good Work,” 309; “Country Holidays for London Children,” Times 25 July 1887, 9; L.T. Mead, “The Children’s Country Holidays,” Atalanta (1893), 707–11, here 710; Jeune, “The Poor Children’s Holiday,” 851; and Barnett, Canon Barnett, 187.
47 Edmund Verney, “Children’s Country Holiday in France,” Good Words 44 (December 1903), 43–51, citations on 48, 51.
48 Guarneri, “Changing Strategies,” 36 and n. 38, suggests that as of 1914 the Fresh Air Fund paid hosts between $2.50 and $4.00 per week.
49 Jackson, “The Children’s Country Holiday Fund,” 96; Meade, “The Children’s Country Holiday,” 710; Jeune, “Holidays for Poor Children,” 456; Rossiter, “The Originator,” 703: Jessen, “Sommerpflege,” 488; and Bergknecht, Ferienkolonien, 17.
50 Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 41; and Sohr, Frauenarbeit, 56.
51 Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 194–6; Nitsch, Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine, 395–6; Mary Lyschinska, Henriette Schrader-Breymann: Ihr Leben aus Briefen und Tagebüchern zusammengestellt und erläutert, 2 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922), 2: 35; and Sohr, Frauenarbeit, 54–5. Proceeds from Sohr’s book benefitted the Ferienkolonien.
52 Margarete Poschinger, Kaiser Friedrich in neuer quellenmässiger Darstellung, 3 vols. (Berlin: R. Schröder, 1899), 3: 317; and Lyschinska, Schrader-Breymann, 2: 315–7.
53 Petra Wilhelmy, Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert (1780–1914) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), 258; Rudolf Vierhaus, Das Tagebuch der Baronin Spitzemberg: Aufzeichungungen aus der Hofgesellschaft des Hohenzollernreiches (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1960), 235, 247; Im Luft und Sonne, 9–10; Rauch, Ferienkolonienbewegung, 203; Reginald Meath, Memories of the 19th Century (New York: J. Murray, 1923), 284; Arthur Gould Lee, The Empress Frederick Writes to Sophie, Her Daughter (London: Faber & Faber, 1955), 110; and Zentrale für private Fürsorge, Berlin, Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen Berlins, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1907), 232.
54 Rauch, Die Ferienkoloniebewegung, 282–6.
55 Downs, Childhood in the Promised Land, xiv–xv.
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James C. Albisetti
James C. Albisetti is the author of two books and of over 40 articles and chapters. He served six years as associate editor of History of Education Quarterly, five years as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, and in 2002–2003 as President of the History of Education Society (USA).