In the fall of 1960 I set out to build a new camp. After looking at many sites, I came to a place called Thiedeman’s resort. To get to the site, I drove down a one mile entrance way, and as I came into the main area of the resort and saw the seven cabins and the home with no open land available, I fell in love with the place. It was here that Camp Timberlane was born, and I employed an old lumberljack who weighed less than a hundred pounds. He cut down many of the trees to open up twenty acres of athletic field and to give me an area to build the lodge. He hauled away the trees using two old plough horses, and we bulldozed the stumps and eventually were ready to open camp in the summer of 1961.

We had 42 boys and a staff of 22 our first year, and many of the facilities we have today were unknown then. But the warmth and love amongst the campers and staff was there, and today after 16 of these years, we have grown to 130 campers and a staff of 73 people from all over the world. We will have campers coming from Formosa and Bogota, Colombia and boys from 23 states.

We have doubled the size of our athletic fields’put up four tennis courts’ a rifle range’ riding ring’ a whole section of boardwalk on our waterfront’ and come in with five times as many new program ideas. Still I hope that we never lost the fun, excitement, and the creativity that we developed in our first year of camp during the summer of the year 1961. That’s what Timberlane is all about, and each of you has had a very special part in seeing that the dream I had when I first drove down the Timberlane driveway sixteen years ago has come true.