Tay Gillespie (1924 – 2018) – Founder of Strong River Camp & Farm

 

When Tay got home from a sailing camp when she was 8 years old, she told her family she was going to have her own camp someday. She loved everything about camping!

 

Tay saw a photo of the Swiss Alps in her Weekly Reader at the age of 10 and asked her father if she could go there. He opened her a savings account at the bank and she started saving for her trip. Years later, when World War II ended, she was on one of the first tourist boats crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Tay loved traveling and meeting people from other countries!

 

Those early travels to Europe made a big impression on Tay. When she started Strong River, she thought it would be great for campers to meet people from other countries and learn about how people live in other parts of the world. Tay felt that the only way the world will experience peace is if young people get to know people from other countries and realize how much we have in common with all people in the world.

 

Tay Gillespie started Strong River Camp & Farm in 1973. Most camps at that time were either all-girls or all-boys camps and the sessions were six or eight weeks long. The campers had uniforms, like blue shorts and white shirts, and were given schedules to go to activities. Tay had a completely different idea about what camp should be like. She thought boys and girls should go to camp together, and wear regular play-clothes, and choose for themselves what activities they wanted to try. She liked shorter sessions so campers could do many things during the summer. And she wanted campers to just enjoy sports for the fun of doing them, with less emphasis on winning and losing. She had lots of new ideas!

 

From the very beginning we have been “green”; composting and not using paper plates and napkins, and re-purposing everything possible. We’ve kept our cabins rustic so you can really hear nature, and breathe fresh air, and discover all the things you can live without. Tay even thought we could relax more and stay focused in the moment if we didn’t let time rule our lives, so she asked us all to leave our watches and clocks at home. We get up with the sun, go to bed when it’s dark and eat when the biscuits come out of the oven.

 

The farm was also important to Tay, and her husband Dr. Guy. She was new to gardening but loved it from the start. Jenora and Magnolia Black lived right down the road and Jenora was an expert gardener and Magnolia was a fabulous cook. They taught all of us how much fun it was to eat fresh out of the garden. The park at the Farm is named for Jenora and our dining room is named for Magnolia. 

 

Strong River is a place where all of Tay’s ideas could come together. We think she was a genius!

 

The most important part of the Strong River Way (which is what we call the camp’s philosophy) for Tay was to teach children how to be a loyal friend. Respecting other people and imagining the way they feel, helping them complete a task or being with them when they try something new for the first time, coming up with a skit idea and working out who says what on stage, sharing an inner tube to ride through the rapids, showing someone a cool dance move or helping them style their hair, figuring out together how to put fresh batteries in a flashlight, and waiting for someone while they find their river shoes, delighting in your cabin-mate’s award – the shared experience of camp creates bonds that can last a lifetime, and at the very least, it can act as a roadmap to building friendships throughout your life.

 

So that is a little of the history of Strong River and Tay, the woman who started it all.  We’ve enjoyed over 50 years of the Strong River Way. We hope you love camp! ​

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