Catoctin Quaker Camp (CQC) is a small, Quaker, residential, wilderness summer camp operated by Baltimore Yearly Meeting for Quaker and non-Quaker children aged 9–14. Catoctin is located off of Old Mink Farm Road, on Catoctin Mountain, near Frederick, Maryland. Children come to camp for two- or four-week sessions. The camp focuses on Quaker values of simplicity, equality, and peace, and the benefits of living in an intentional, child-centered, loving community. Campers are organized into age and ability appropriate cabin groups called units.
Each session consists of a number of days at camp as well as two short three-day trips, often canoeing, backpacking, rock climbing, tubing, or participating in various other outdoor activities. Oldest campers participate in a ten-day-long trip, aptly named "The Ten Day", which is a journey into the mountains of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. In-camp activities include swimming in the lagoon (nicknamed the "goon"), arts and crafts, chores, games, sports, Quaker worship at the fire circle, singing, and other arts activities.
The camp property, owned by Baltimore Yearly Meeting since the mid 1950s, is protected by a conservation easement with the state of Maryland. It is home to several rare plant species as well as geological rarities such as Catoctin Greenstone, which can be found in the walls of the main lodge. The large preserved beams and rafters of the lodge are made from American Chestnut trunks formed before the chestnut blight.
Baltimore Yearly Meeting has been operating summer camps in the region since the 1920s. Other camps currently operated by BYM include Shiloh Quaker Camp, near Charlottesville, Virginia; Opequon Quaker Camp, near Winchester, Virginia; and the Teen Adventure Program, near Lexington, Virginia.
Famous quotes containing the words quaker and/or camp:
“this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast
Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)