Letters From The Time Traveler: Longing For Times Gone By

Dearest,

Do you remember our summers on Lake Ontario? The crisp water, the way the wind would blow over the lake? How the children would run and splash in the water, without a care in the world?

I recently was in a library in western NY and came across a display of photos of the lake cabins that used to be rented. We are not pictured in these photos, they were taken turn of the century. However, many of the buildings are still the same.

I thought I recognized some of the people, like Clif from our town. He would have been very old at 1900 though!

Summer Resort Culture

It really was the wealthy who started the summer resort culture:

And it was the rich — or the super-rich, really — who started building summer places of their own: “camps” in the Adirondacks, twenty-thousand-square-foot “cottages” on the cliffs in Newport. Working people didn’t get time off, and farmers, in particular, were busiest during the hot summer months. Schools let children out during the summer not so they could be idle, or because the teacher needed a break, but so they could help in the fields.

Summer didn’t have to be idle. Some early camping spots, like Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, or Ocean Grove, in…