Dorothy Elliott and her dog sitting outside Squirrel Lodge at Camp Willapa, 1950.

Dorothy Elliott 1894-1979

My first memory of Miss Elliott is of a single blue eyeball peering at me through a knothole in my cabin. It was 1944. I was eight. It was rest time and I was reading, even though the bell had rung and I knew we were to put books away and “rest” for a half hour. I was so busted! Miss Elliott never mentioned the incident to me but we both knew that we both knew. I wish I could say I never read during rest time again but in the next seven or eight summers I was at Camp Willapa, I’m quite sure I did more reading than resting during that hour after lunch.

Dorothy Elliott was a friend of my grandparents and probably one of the most formidable (and quietly influential) adults I ever knew — at least with regard to my character. And for how many others, I wonder. She founded Camp Willapa for girls in 1918. Not only was it the first private camp for girls in the State of Washington, it was so popular and successful that the girls’ parents begged her to include their sons as well.

Pull Quote

A teacher of the first order who led by example, not by explanation, and gave us the great gift of believing in us.

After much thought, Dorothy began “Sherwood Forest” in 1926 — in the woods up near Leadbetter Point, well separated from the girls. The boys lived in tree houses and were the envy of their sisters who lived in tent cabins, also in the woods, but on the sandy bluffs along Willapa Bay just north of Nahcotta. The high point each year came when the boys and girls traded campsites for 24 hours — the girls impressed with their arbol quarters, but perhaps not the “grounded” boys. It was the advent of World War II which finally prompted Dorothy to consolidate (more-or-less) the two camps with Sherwood Forest to the north of the entrance road and Camp Willapa to the south.

Our activities included swimming, boating, fishing, story hours, and hikes. There was horseback riding, tennis, sailing in the Sherwilla. We learned to paddle canoes, row boats, take care of baby bunnies and ducks. We gathered samples of huckleberry, bracken, and other plants – then pressed and dried them and put them into books, carefully labeled. We learned to saddle, bridle and curry the horses and how to pack a knapsack for a four-day overnight to Long Island. Most nights we sang around the campfire and on Sundays we were allowed into “The Ark,” Miss Elliott’s house, where we sang old-fashioned hymns to music from the upright piano. (Did Miss Elliott play? I can’t remember.)

And, of course, we pumped water and chopped wood and built fires under the giant cauldron that served as our hot water source for daily washing and minor laundry needs. (I think we sent our dirty clothes out to the Chellis Laundry in Ocean Park once a week.) We had most meals in the cook tent and I especially remember the years that Mrs. Eberhardt was the “Cookie” and even managed an extra cookie or two for whoever was on K.P. Duty that day! Yum!

Two four-week sessions every summer. The highlights of my childhood — or at least of my summers! I was even a “junior counselor” my final year, in 1950 or ’51! It came as a great surprise to me some years later to get to know Dorothy as an adult. To find that she wore dresses when she wasn’t at camp and was active in the DAR and had gone to the University of Washington and had done graduate work at Reed. And had taught there, as well.

Only in retrospect, and probably after I had been teaching for a while myself, did I think about Miss Elliott’s “teaching” style — for that, of course, was who she was. A teacher of the first order who led by example, not by explanation, and gave us the great gift of believing in us. Wimpy and inexperienced as we might have been, she knew we could and would rise to the occasion and feel “very much accomplished” for having done so!

Much to the wonder of some of our parents, Miss Elliott never had a serious accident in all 32 years of her oversight and everyone who knew of her pending retirement in 1960 jumped for joy when she turned over the reins to former camper-and-stable-boy Alan Griener and his wife Barbie. Camp would go on! And so it did for many a year.