Camp Miramichee Photo Book Now Available

This photo book on the history of Camp Miramichee, a YWCA in Hardy, Arkansas, is now available in hard and soft cover in time for the venerable camp’s 100th anniversary. Miramichee opened in 1916 and closed forever in 1989. But since 2005 alumna of the camp they loved as girls have been meeting every September for reunions. And this year, by strange coincidence, is also the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Boy Scout camp a half a mile upriver, Kia Kima. AND the centennial of the founding of Cherokee Village, a vacation community about a mile upriver from Kia Kima.

Hardy was a retreat for families from Memphis and the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas for generations. The camps in the little town in the foothills of the Ozarks also included a Girl Scout camp, Kiwanee, and another Boy Scout camp, Cedar Valley.

It was an amazing place, an environment where girls could be as tough and fearless as they wanted to be. And now, to a woman, we credit much of what we have  accomplished to those days on the Spring River, shooting white water in our 17-foot aluminum canoes or diving into the chilly river on foggy mornings before we were really awake.

So here’s a tribute to Camp Miramichee and all the camps like it across the United States that turned timid little girls into fierce and competent women.