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Sending City Children to the Country: Vacations in 'Nature' ca. 1870-1900

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Title: Sending City Children to the Country: Vacations in 'Nature' ca. 1870-1900
Language: English
Authors: Albisetti, James C.
Source: Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education. 2020 56(1-2):70-84.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 15
Publication Date: 2020
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Descriptors: Educational History, Foreign Countries, Urban Areas, Rural Areas, Summer Programs, Child Health, At Risk Students, Resident Camp Programs, Natural Resources, Vacations, Body Weight, Program Effectiveness
Geographic Terms: United States, Europe
DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2019.1675729
ISSN: 0030-9230
Abstract: The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a new but rapidly spreading perspective on the link between education and nature: middle-class philanthropists joining together to provide summer vacations in the countryside for poor, sickly, urban children. Drawing on numerous examples of such work in Europe and the United States, this essay highlights the common traits and local variations of these programmes designed to improve the physical health and often the moral tone of such endangered children. It highlights in particular the fundamental disagreements over whether it was better to house such children in the homes of rural families or to keep them together in groups under the supervision of teachers or other adults. In conclusion, it examines the important role of a single patron, the Prussian/German Crown Princess Victoria.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2020
Accession Number: EJ1254149
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0143139691;j5401feb.20;2020May12.06:08;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0143139691-1">Sending city children to the country: vacations in "nature" ca. 1870–1900 </title> <p>The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a new but rapidly spreading perspective on the link between education and nature: middle-class philanthropists joining together to provide summer vacations in the countryside for poor, sickly, urban children. Drawing on numerous examples of such work in Europe and the United States, this essay highlights the common traits and local variations of these programmes designed to improve the physical health and often the moral tone of such endangered children. It highlights in particular the fundamental disagreements over whether it was better to house such children in the homes of rural families or to keep them together in groups under the supervision of teachers or other adults. In conclusion, it examines the important role of a single patron, the Prussian/German Crown Princess Victoria.</p> <p>Keywords: Country Holidays Fund; Fresh Air Fund; colonies de vacances; Ferienkolonien; Crown Princess Victoria</p> <p>Rapid urbanisation in Western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century produced widespread nostalgia for the simplicity of rural life. Between the early 1870s and late 1880s, however, this phenomenon took on a new form: philanthropic organisations devoted to sending poor, frail, or sickly children to the countryside for a week or more of fresh air and healthy food. Organisations dedicated to this cause emerged not only in major cities – the Children's Country Holidays Fund (CCHF) in London, the Fresh Air Fund in New York City, and both the <emph>Oeuvre des Trois Semaines</emph> and the <emph>Oeuvre de la Chaussée de Maine</emph> in Paris – but also in many small and medium-sized cities. Works from the time such as Walter Ufford's <emph>Fresh Air Charity in the United States</emph> (1897), several articles from the 1890s by British authors, and a pamphlet by a Berlin continuation school teacher from 1902 reveal that these most famous organisations were far from alone in attempting to address the perceived problems of urban children.[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>]</p> <p>Recent studies of such philanthropies exist by Thilo Rauch on Germany, Laura Lee Downs on France, Hester Barron on London (through primarily on the interwar years), and Julia Guarneri on New York up to 1926, as well as Tobin Shearer on the Fresh Air Fund from 1940 through the 1970s.[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>] None of these works, however, adopts a comparative perspective or even hints that such an approach would be fruitful. The one point of contact among them is that both Rauch and Downs see direct influence on the earliest German and French colonies, respectively, by a Protestant pastor from Zurich, Walter Bion, who first took a group of children to the mountains of Appenzell in 1876.[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref3">3</reflink>] Bion himself, in fact, published on the occasion of his project's twenty-fifth anniversary in 1901 what appears to be the only broad comparative study of such summer colonies. That book reported that only the poorer and less urbanised societies of extreme south-eastern and south-western Europe were not yet doing anything to provide country vacations for urban children.[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref4">4</reflink>]</p> <p>Bion claimed that his own work in Zurich pioneered the movement for vacation colonies, which he defined as groups of children housed together and under the supervision of a pastor, teacher, or some other adult; this classification disqualified programmes that housed children with rural families. Rauch, in contrast, traced interest in providing "cures" for seriously ill children back into the late eighteenth century, discussing several early efforts at seaside hospitals or spas for sick children as precursors of later <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>.[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref5">5</reflink>] Writing many years after the Reverend Samuel Barnett started in 1877 what became the CCHF, his widow Henrietta claimed – in apparent ignorance of Bion's work – that the London organisation "has been the pioneer of similar societies in England, on the Continent, and in America". In similar fashion, the originator of New York's Fresh Air Fund in 1877, Willard Parsons, stressed its pioneer status not only for other American cities, but also for visitors from Canada and Britain. "Germany and Italy, too, have sent for information on the subject", he noted in the early 1890s. Yet Ufford made clear that the Fresh Air Fund had predecessors even in the United States, including the "Fresh Air Week" programme begun in 1875 in Boston, whose founder "drew inspiration from reading of a similar experiment in Copenhagen".[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref6">6</reflink>] Priority and direct influences are thus muddled, but the near simultaneity of these developments clearly emphasises a similar perceived need in multiple societies.</p> <p>Central to all these programmes was a basic belief that life in the city, especially in urban slums, was both unnatural and uncivilised. Children growing up in such environments were, in general, neither healthy nor well supervised. Bion himself noted that even his own middle-class children saw their health deteriorate when they moved to Zurich – far from the poster child for nineteenth-century slums – and improve again after long visits to their hometown. In the days before widespread pasteurisation, refrigeration, and food inspection, urban food supplies could even be deadly, especially during hot summer months. With regard to the lower classes of Victorian London, Anthony Wohl has written, "Nearly all the diets investigated reveal a serious lack of fresh green vegetables, a low protein intake, and very little fresh milk"; what was available was often "contaminated and positively detrimental to health". In New York City, "Death from diarrhea peaked in July and August when the bacteria in the – often already filthy – milk multiplied more rapidly". Writing in 1887, Jesse Battershall, a trained chemist investigating food adulteration, suggested that the appointment of a State Dairy Commissioner in 1884 had led to significant improvement; yet in 1908 another author suggested that the New York milk supply was as scandalous as the Chicago meat packers recently exposed by Upton Sinclair's <emph>The Jungle</emph>.[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref7">7</reflink>]</p> <p>Conditions in many European cities were no better. Writing about Hamburg, Richard Evans noted, "[t]he nineteenth century saw a serious decline in the quality of many foodstuffs, due partly to problems of hygiene but above all resulting from the growing practice of adulteration". In addition, "[m]ilk, which was subject to a series of special investigations in the 1890s, was particularly unhygienic". In Berlin, continuing problems with the milk supply led to establishment of a Society for Combatting Infant Mortality, but only in late 1904.[<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref8">8</reflink>] Thus the desirability of removing children from city streets for at least part of the summer was obvious.</p> <p>In France and Germany, the focus on health derived in part from concern about the future vitality of the nation and the fitness of soldiers. As Downs put it, after the defeat of 1870 all sections of French opinion agreed "the demographic future of France rested on the fragile bodies of urban, working-class children". In spring 1880, Prussian Minister of Religion and Education Robert von Puttkamer explicitly linked support of <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph> to the health of future draftees.[<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref9">9</reflink>]</p> <p>Neither Britain nor the United States had a large standing army or a draft in that era, so similar concerns did not surface in either country.[<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref10">10</reflink>] Reverend Barnett voiced an even "higher" concern in one appeal for donations: "The ideal which I would place before you is the salvation of the children, the elevation not just of their capacity to be happy and strong, but the development of the power to know God and love their neighbors". Unique to the United States was the fact that many urban children, especially in New York, were the offspring of immigrants who had never known rural or small-town American life; "Americanisation" rather than military fitness provided an extra motivation to philanthropists.[<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref11">11</reflink>] Ufford found that no American cities west of St Louis and Minneapolis (both on the Mississippi River) had "fresh-air" charities; such cities were not only less crowded and closer to "nature", but they also had fewer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.[<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref12">12</reflink>]</p> <p>Only one source encountered in my research suggested the distinct advantages of urban life for children. Discussing London children transported to the New Forest region in 1883, a local resident there asserted</p> <p>I think, taking mind and body together, that the London children were in a healthier state – a state, I mean, in which all their powers of mind and body are in more active use, than those of their brothers and sisters in the country.</p> <p>Even this man, though, considered the project extremely worthwhile for both hosts and guests.[<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref13">13</reflink>]</p> <p>If few sponsors of vacation colonies spoke as openly about "salvation" as did Barnett, all expressed concern with the moral as well as the physical well-being of urban children. Whether they chose to house children with rural families or to keep them in group accommodations and specially built camps, sponsors expected the experience to improve the cleanliness and orderly habits of the beneficiaries of such holidays. Some, but not all, programmes either tolerated or expected that hosts would put their guests to work at harvest time. The main Danish organisation, the CCHF, and the Fresh Air Fund considered it acceptable for children to perform some labour; in France, however, the main organisation in Lyon clearly forbade such potential exploitation.[<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref14">14</reflink>]</p> <p>If there was general agreement that city streets were an "unnatural" environment for children, there was nonetheless little discussion of what "nature" children should experience instead. The title of a commemorative album, published in 1888 to raise money by the Central Committee of the German Associations for <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, expressed the basic view – <emph>Im Luft und Sonne</emph> (<emph>In [Fresh] Air and Sun</emph>) was how city children should spend their summers. Similar vagueness appeared in comments in 1890 by Mary Jeune, whose organisation sent hundreds of children from London parishes to Essex: "The success of the work lies in the fact that it is the first time in the children's lives in which they are brought into contact with the beauties of nature, and of all the lessons she teaches".[<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref15">15</reflink>] Bion's efforts not only to remove his charges from Zurich's streets but also to take them to the mountains of Appenzell stood out as exceptional in the 1870s and 1880s. In that era, some German associations, especially Berlin's, did more than in other countries to send frail or sickly children to seaside colonies or to mineral springs for "cures" that went beyond fresh air and sunshine.[<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref16">16</reflink>] Yet the two original French groups, the CCHF, and the Fresh Air Fund focused overwhelmingly on small towns or farms within easy reach of Paris, London, and New York, respectively. In the United States during this era, some camps existed in remote mountainous areas such as the Adirondacks or New Hampshire; but they attracted middle- and upper-class children. Such camps often tried to recreate pioneer, or even Native American, experiences with woodcraft skills and other aspects of survival in the "wilderness" that were absent from the fresh air charities.[<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref17">17</reflink>]</p> <p>Proximity to the city was an absolute necessity for day camps or excursions, what Germans tended to call "half colonies". Parsons recorded that although the Fresh Air Fund originally sent all its clientele away for extended stays, as early as 1880 it also began providing day excursions. In the early 1890s, the number of day campers far exceeded those who benefitted from two weeks in the country; from 1877 through 1894, the day trippers totalled 136,411, versus 133,263 recipients of extended vacations. Most remarkable was that fact that "the entire expenses of the day excursions have been borne by one gentleman" who provided "for the entire season the use of a grove on the Hudson" and "all the money for barges, music, and milk".[<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref18">18</reflink>]</p> <p>In Zurich, Bion and his supporters began in 1882 to provide "milk cures" for younger children and for those unable to travel to Appenzell. For Switzerland as a whole up to 1895, more children benefitted from such day assistance than from residential colonies, 29,231 to 21,734. Some German cities also introduced short-term excursions. Rauch estimated that 28% of children benefitting from fresh-air philanthropy in Germany between 1885 and 1894 had only such day trips, or roughly 65,000 out of 232,000. The annual report for 1895 by the group that oversaw the Berlin colonies, the Association for Domestic Hygiene (<emph>Verein für häusliche Gesundheitspflege)</emph>, suggested that doubts had been raised about the long-term value of such brief doses of fresh air; yet the organisation rejected a proposal to concentrate all its funds on sending fewer children on longer vacations. Paris also had half-day or full-day excursions; in 1899 as many as 21,500 children took part. By the end of the century, even St Petersburg was home to a charity day camp held in a public garden.[<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref19">19</reflink>]</p> <p>From the beginning, a major concern of sponsors of colonies was demonstrating that they had an overall positive effect. Some of the evidence they presented was highly impressionistic and anecdotal. An article from summer 1884 reported on the work of Miss Bryce and Miss Brooke, who sent children to the country from a London West End parish:</p> <p>The organizers of the scheme had their reward in a marked improvement in the health of the children and their capacity for work, and "even now", they write, "after so many months, you can still perceive the difference in their appearance".</p> <p>An article in the <emph>British Medical Journal</emph> in 1888 relied on similar generalities: "The country is clean, the town is not so; different sights, sounds, and smells there impress the senses, and the whole being of the child is changed thereby". Speaking of beneficiaries of the Fresh Air Fund, Parsons claimed, "In hundreds of instances about which I have personally known" the child "has returned with head and heart full of new ways, new ideas of decent living, and has successfully taught the shiftless parents the better way".[<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref20">20</reflink>]</p> <p>Most organisers, though, sought more empirical data on the health of their charges. Parsons himself cited reports by a Doctor White, who examined the first cohort sent out of New York City and reported: "Appetites improved, coughs ceased to be troublesome, ulcers healed, growing deformities were arrested, cheeks filled out and grew ruddy". In 1890, despite lacking complete data, a Dr Daniel noted with regard to his experience of 235 children who had benefited from the Fresh Air Fund, "[m]y impression is that at least one-half of the children are improved physically. The most marked improvement is in appetite and general appearance".[<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref21">21</reflink>]</p> <p>The most common measure for determining impact was weight gain. Bion reported that among Swiss cities Geneva was particularly assiduous in keeping records on this matter. The early French programmes also stressed such physical growth; Downs noted as a stunning exception that in the first Catholic-run colony in the late 1890s "children were neither weighed nor measured at the departure and return". Rauch's research on Germany revealed that "almost all sponsors of summer colonies ... kept painfully exact statistics of weight gain during a sojourn in a colony". The Berlin Committee, for example, recorded in 1886 an average weight gain between 1.0 and 1.5 kilograms for its children. Some German colonies also kept track of red blood counts. One of these, the city of Bremen, claimed in 1885, "[t]he majority of our 'colonists' not only became but remained healthier", citing as evidence fewer missed school days.[<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref22">22</reflink>]</p> <p>Downs's comment about the lateness of the first Catholic programme in France highlights how Protestant-dominated the early colony movement was. Bion, Barnett, Parsons, William Gannett of Boston's original Country Week, and the originator of Hamburg's programme in 1876, a man named Schoost, were all Protestant clerics. The Fresh Air Fund in its early years recruited through Protestant missions in tenement districts and thus sent few Catholics and "no Jewish or black children" to host families, certainly a major limitation on its "Americanisation" goals. More striking, in heavily Catholic France the <emph>Oeuvres de Trois Semaines</emph> had a Pastor Loriaux as its founder, and the head of the <emph>Oeuvres de Chaussée de Maine</emph> was Elise de Pressensé, member of a prominent Protestant family; both groups originally aimed at Protestant children but soon the majority of their clientele was Catholic. A lay Protestant strongly influenced by Bion, Edmond Cottinet, was the driving force behind using parts of Parisian school budgets (<emph>caisses d'écoles</emph>) – and eventually, city funds – to support country holidays; this programme eventually attracted many more children than did the original charities. In Lyon as well, Pastor Louis Conte headed the main organisation. Among the summer programmes eventually established in St Petersburg, the first, in 1879, served the small Protestant community. For Germany, Rauch found that among Catholic regions only Munich and the industrialised Cologne-Duisburg area participated actively in the creation of vacation colonies.[<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref23">23</reflink>]</p> <p>In general, physicians played a larger role in Germany than elsewhere. Berlin's colony movement began with an appeal by a Dr [C.A?] Ewald in 1879, and he looked to the programme begun the year before in Frankfurt-am-Main, largely at the urging of Dr Georg Varrentrapp. A moving force behind the Frankfurt Statistical Bureau established in 1865 and the national German Association for Public Health of 1873, Varrentrapp easily extended his interest to the health of urban children after visiting Bion's colony in 1877. In 1883, he challenged those who overemphasised the potential moral or pedagogical value of summer programmes by insisting, "[t]he main consideration for <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph> is the strengthening of bodily health".[<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref24">24</reflink>]</p> <p>An article in <emph>Good Words</emph> in December 1883 brought the Frankfurt programme to the attention of British readers, without naming Varrentrapp. It pointed to both the average weight gain of two-and-a-half pounds in 25 days by the "colonists" and "the improved moral tone and behavior of these poor children". The author, A.A. Strange-Butson, opined, "I cannot help feeling that in our own great London and provincial cities we should be able to imitate a similar organisation". A decade later, <emph>The British Medical Journal</emph> reported on the research of Dr Schmid-Monnard of Halle into the lasting impact of that city's <emph>Fereienkolonien</emph>, which it suggested "goes far to prove that the holiday does produce a permanent effect".[<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref25">25</reflink>]</p> <p>Both the ages of the children included and the length of country stays varied from place to place; the mix of boys and girls did as well. Bion began taking only those aged 9 to 12, whereas the Fresh Air Fund in New York included children as young as 3. Berlin targeted those from 7 to 14, roughly the years of mandatory school attendance; the Danish organisation did the same.[<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref26">26</reflink>] Older boys and girls were excluded for differing reasons: the boys were too rowdy and the girls might be morally endangered, especially if housed with host families. When the Fresh Air Fund began taking older girls at the turn of the century, it placed them in converted or specially constructed group homes. In France, the <emph>Oeuvres de Trois Semaines</emph> also built a home for older girls in 1891 at its largest destination, the village of Monjavoult (Oise).[<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref27">27</reflink>]</p> <p>As to the length of stay, except for the "half colonies" all programmes provided at least a week and often more time in the country. The CCHF aimed at a standard stay of two weeks, as did the Fresh Air Fund. Bion reported as of 1901 that Milan sent children to the mountains for a month, while the relevant organisation in Christiania (Oslo) extended the stay to six weeks. He considered the two-week vacations provided in Belgium to be "somewhat too little" but made no comment on the average three- to four-week holidays in the Netherlands.[<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref28">28</reflink>] In a private effort to give poor children from Leeds a "healthy and happy change from the smoky city air in which they spend their lives", Rosalind Howard of Castle Howard aimed at three weeks. So did the programme Mary Jeune managed in Essex, though "for the more delicate ones the time is extended as circumstances require". She considered that time span to be "about the duration of good behavior. Boys are always manageable for that time, but afterwards they seem to get out of hand".[<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref29">29</reflink>] In France, the <emph>Trois Semaines</emph> lived up to its name, whereas the <emph>Chaussée de Maine</emph> housed children for much of the summer, two to three months. Cottinet's programme, financed in part from the <emph>caisses d'écoles</emph>, offered stays of one month.[<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref30">30</reflink>]</p> <p>Downs made clear that the early organisers of <emph>colonies de vacances</emph> focused much more on boys than on girls, who were less in need of being moralised. More male than female teachers appear to have been willing to take groups to rural areas during the summer. She also assumed that "parents undoubtedly manifested a greater reluctance to part with their daughters for such long periods of time". In contrast, host families in both England and the United States tended to prefer hosting girls. As Mary Jeune noted from her experience, families chose girls, who "eat less and are more easy [sic] to manage". Shearer suggested that Fresh Air families thought they would "develop stronger host relationships" with girls.[<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref31">31</reflink>]</p> <p>All sponsors of summer colonies faced the problem of choosing which children to benefit. According to Rauch, Bion's first selections in Zurich looked at children who were poor, needed rest and recuperation, and behaved well in school. Yet Bion himself in 1901 claimed that both the French colonies associated with the <emph>caises d'écoles</emph> and Belgian colonies relied too much on school performance, in essence turning a vacation in the countryside into a reward for prized pupils, often selected by their teachers. In Munich as well, teachers chose the pupils who would benefit; but most German cities relied on associations working with physicians.[<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref32">32</reflink>] A contemporary listing of Berlin charities indicated that poor children who were either "sickly or in need of strengthening" benefitted from colonies, though a recent scholar has added "diligence and good behavior" in school to the criteria used for selection. Clearly excluded were those with contagious diseases, those needing more extensive medical care than the colonies could provide, and those who would not benefit from several weeks away from home.[<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref33">33</reflink>]</p> <p>The Fresh Air Fund and the CCHF employed huge numbers of volunteers – ministers, mission workers, physicians, social workers, and teachers – to scour New York and London for eligible children. Parsons reported more than 200 individuals helping to locate and screen possible beneficiaries who were "poor and needy, without any infectious diseases, clean, and free from vermin". Failing to meet the fourth criterion led to the majority of rejections. In London as of 1894, 50 committees with about 500 members searched for likely children for the CCHF. Despite the general reputation of resistance by the London poor to intrusion of "do-gooders" into their homes, CCHF committee members managed to evaluate not only the children but the financial capacity of the family to pay part of the costs for the holiday, which that organisation required in most cases.[<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref34">34</reflink>] Only a much smaller programme such as that run during the 1880s by Elizabeth Rossiter, who entertained 20 poor girls at a time in her home in Essex, could receive city children "simply in order of application from the parents, without any inquiry as to character or habits, without any formality of committee, or anything else".[<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref35">35</reflink>]</p> <p>Competing organisations had to worry about duplication of effort. Mary Jeune noted in 1893, "[t]here are many small agencies at work besides the large one, so that it is very difficult to say with any certainty how many children go yearly from London to the country". Although the Charity Organisation Society endeavoured to establish a common list of beneficiaries, the effort seems to have failed. A letter to <emph>The Times</emph> in September 1896 challenged the common view "that there is no duplication of relief" and asserted that free programmes tended to draw off children from the CCHF.[<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref36">36</reflink>] Rauch documented similar discussions about prevention of "double-dipping" in Germany during the same period. In New York City, discussions among groups providing holidays began as early as 1888, but a call in 1891 for creation of a common list by that city's COS also failed. According to Ufford in 1897, "[i]nterviews with the children in summer colonies would probably discover that their opportunities for summer outings are not as limited on the whole as sometimes fancied".[<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref37">37</reflink>]</p> <p>In situations where societies paid country families to board children, the possibility of deception by the hosts could arise. Mary Jeune was the only author to detail such a case: a woman in Berkshire took in 14 children through three different agencies and managed to fool the visitors sent by the sponsoring groups by keeping children sent by others out of sight.[<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref38">38</reflink>] More common was the fear that host families could not provide a suitable moral environment. Downs suggested that French Catholics in general and the clergy in particular did not consider peasants' homes to be a suitable moral environment. Bion in his 1901 summary suggested that no one ever considered the homes of Italian, Russian, or Spanish peasants to be suitable sites for urban children to pass the summer. Even in Scotland, Glasgow philanthropists decided after a brief period that the homes of cotters were neither suitable nor numerous enough to meet the needs of city children.[<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref39">39</reflink>]</p> <p>Before the turn of the twentieth century, Denmark appears to have been the only country to orchestrate exchange of children between country and city. About 10,000 left greater Copenhagen for rural areas; but a similar number spent part of their summer in the capital. The relative social status of hosts and guests in this situation is not clear.[<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref40">40</reflink>]</p> <p>Founders and boosters of summer colonies seldom publicised problems with their programmes. One worker for the CCHF in Buckinghamshire did admit, "[i]t is lamentable that here and there villages are closed to the children because one year they were insufficiently shepherded and got into mischief". More common, it appears, was homesickness or dislike for the changed circumstances of life. Archival research by Barron on the CCHF and Shearer on the Fresh Air Fund has revealed more cases of unhappy children and disappointed hosts, for the latter especially once black and Latino children became the major clientele after World War II.[<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref41">41</reflink>]</p> <p>Shearer claimed that "prior to 1960, hardly anyone criticized the Fresh Air program in print". Yet already in the early 1890s Parsons noted: "One minister writes, 'It will only make the child discontented with the surroundings where God placed him'" – which for Parsons was a desirable occurrence for "the tenement-house child". Mary Jeune offered a different version of the same complaint: many people in England argued that "it is hard on the children, after giving them such ... a glimpse of a happy existence, to send them back to their wretched homes". As early as Bion's first appeal for funds in June 1876, one critic labelled him a "socialist swindler", although it is not clear if his charity to the poor or his willingness to intrude into family life angered this opponent.[<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref42">42</reflink>]</p> <p>The biggest disagreement within the broad movement for summer holidays involved the relative value of "boarding out" city children versus housing them together in either rented or specially built homes or camps. Bion, who reserved the term <emph>Ferienkolonie</emph> for the latter, nonetheless had begun in 1876 by boarding out 34 boys and 34 girls (divided into two successive cohorts) in "peasant houses". For a decade the Zurich group rented space in country inns; only in 1888 did they acquire their own "home" in the village of Gais. Bion also cited the Frenchman Cottinet arguing in 1887 that "France could never have imitated the Danish system of boarding out privately, because it lacked all the educational benefits of housing children together"; yet he too had begun with "boarding out" before quickly abandoning the practice for more closely supervised group homes. The role of elementary school teachers in these colonies may have served to improve relationships with pupils during the following school year, but it also introduced something of a "summer school" atmosphere, in terms of field trips and nature hikes if not of academic instruction. A clear disadvantage for common housing, whether rented or built by the sponsoring organisation, was the significantly higher cost, which limited the number of children benefitting from holidays. Such costs contributed to the fact that as late as 1910 "over half the 72,866 French children sent <emph>en colonie</emph> found themselves settled in with peasant families".[<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref43">43</reflink>]</p> <p>Outside of New York City, Ufford found in the late 1890s that 22 organisations relied on group housing versus 12 devoted to "boarding out". In New York, though, only the Fresh Air Fund persisted with the original pattern whereas 13 other groups had turned to camps. Given the numbers the Fresh Air Fund served, even it had acquired 12 "homes" serving 3000 children per year. Parsons admitted the value of group homes, yet he insisted, "[t]he best results are obtained where the children are received into the country families, for there the great moral influences are best exerted". By 1913, though, Guarneri estimates that camps served half of the Fresh Air Fund's beneficiaries, especially those more difficult to place with families – crippled children, blacks, older boys and girls. Yet Parsons's successor Leslie Marsland Conly still saw the "intimate touch and the good influence of the home circle" as the better environment.[<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref44">44</reflink>]</p> <p>Germany offered a mixed picture. Varrentrapp of Frankfurt saw the advantage of sending children with their teachers, but by the mid-1880s that city began boarding out some of its children. Berlin's association began with "boarding out"; but, according to Luise Jessen, by the mid-1890s it drew on all forms of "summer care" where appropriate. The chief concern in the mid-1880s was host families "not among the notables of the area" who went to work and left children unsupervised; and as late as 1900 the main association argued strongly for closed colonies. Yet a Women's Association "Edelweiss" in the German capital had begun boarding out smaller numbers of children in 1885; 10 years later it aided 227. The sponsoring association in the German city of Kassel preferred boarding out for how it helped poor children become "accustomed to a proper, piously conducted household, to punctuality, obedience, and cleanliness, which the little ones take home with them". Overall, Rauch estimated that between 1885 and 1894, only 11% of German beneficiaries of such programmes boarded out, 29% were in group housing, and 28% attended only "half colonies". The remaining 33% went for either a spa or seacoast cure.[<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref45">45</reflink>]</p> <p>Bion criticised "boarding out" in England for "not furthering moral and spiritual growth as well as did residence in colonies". Without being aware of his views, English authors nonetheless offered numerous defences for their practice. Discussing the first holidays in the New Forest in 1883, Frank Norris concluded: "Such contact makes a link between town and country, enlarges human sympathies, makes people forget to be selfish". In a letter seeking donations for the CCHF in 1887, Bishop of London Frederick Temple said regarding children staying in country cottages, "[i]n the perfect freedom of family life they learn lessons never to be forgotten". Novelist and children's writer L.T. Meade in 1893 saw an advantage in not keeping children who knew each other together, as often happened with French or German colonists from a single school: "From the experience of many workers it is most important to scatter the town children as much as possible when they go into the country". Writing the same year, Mary Jeune emphasised "the strong personal feeling of affection that grows up between the children and their country hosts". More than a quarter century after first sending children from Whitechapel to the countryside, Barnett still resisted the idea of transitioning to camps, although he admitted, "[t]here are, doubtless, good arguments to support such proposals".[<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref46">46</reflink>]</p> <p>Edmund Verney, son of Florence Nightingale's long-time supporter Sir Harry Verney, actually witnessed a French colony in person. In late 1903 he published an account of his visit to the village of Mandres in the Vosges Mountains. The <emph>colonie scolaire</emph> there was the work of a Parisian physician, Dr Graux, and a member of the Municipal Council of Paris's 11th arrondissement, M. Duval; the latter bought an available chateau and donated it to the relevant <emph>caisse d'école</emph>. The colony at Mandres provided three weeks of vacation each to five cohorts of 200, with boys and girls alternating. The physically and/or scholastically weaker students went first, before the school year ended, whereas the final group comprised the "elite of the school". All were weighed and measured at the beginning and end of their stays. Verney openly admitted the success of the colony: "Cleanly habits of thought and action, perhaps hitherto unknown, the discipline of good manners at meals, and the unselfishness induced by the common life of a well-ordered community" were among the benefits he mentioned; the higher costs – 16 shillings per week versus an average of 5 shillings for the CCHF – were a major disadvantage. Yet Verney ultimately defended English practice: "London children ... are introduced into quite a new world, make fresh, often lasting, friendships, and experience for themselves both the advantages and the drawbacks of country life". He concluded: "Such spontaneous and valuable friendships are impossible under the French system", where the colony "enters into no relations with the village community".[<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref47">47</reflink>]</p> <p>If the Fresh Air Fund and the CCHF shared in the long-term defence of boarding out, the two societies had one striking difference. As mentioned above, the New York society, at least at first, did not pay its host families even a reimbursement for the cost of the food they gave to urban children, which implies that such families were on average wealthier than their English equivalents.[<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref48">48</reflink>] The CCHF, on the other hand, not only followed the more typical practice of modest financial incentives to take in boarders; it also required some financial contribution from the parents. The justification for this policy was to maintain some semblance of "independence and self-help" rather than turn the holidays into a simple handout. L.T. Meade defended the practice on that basis, arguing that such small self-denials to benefit their children "raise the couple immeasurably in the scale of love and goodness". Sponsors of purely charitable country holidays, however, criticised the CCHF for a policy that could "preclude the children who are most in need of it". Its practice did not prevent it from having by far the largest programme of any of those discussed: its 30,000 children in 1897 dwarfed the total who attended Swiss colonies in the preceding two decades and was nine times the number sent out from Berlin that year.[<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref49">49</reflink>]</p> <p>German organisations sponsoring both cures and summer holidays for children benefitted very early from royal patronage. Crown Princess Victoria (Vicky) became the protector of the Association of Children's <emph>Heilstätten</emph> ("healing places" or sanatoria) on the German Seacoasts established in 1880; a year later, a meeting in Berlin resolved to raise money for a 250-bed facility on the island of Norderney in the North Sea.[<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref50">50</reflink>] That autumn, representatives from 23 German, Austrian, and Swiss organisations that sponsored <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph> met in Berlin under the chairmanship of former Prussian Minister of Religion and Education Adalbert Falk, then head of the Association for Domestic Hygiene, to discuss establishing an association. The Crown Princess showed up and announced her willingness to expand her protection of the Berlin group to all the sponsoring organisations in the Reich. She herself had sponsored a "half colony" in summer 1881 at the estate of Bornstedt, near the New Palace at Potsdam, which she and her husband Fritz owned privately. Fourteen children at a time came to the farm to pick fruit, swim in the Havel, and partake of an evening meal in the Palace courtyard before returning to the city.[<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref51">51</reflink>]</p> <p>Vicky's patronage took many forms. When donors from across the nation gave over 800,000 Marks intended for charity to Fritz and her on their twenty-fifth anniversary in early 1883, they directed 170,000 in capital to the Society for Domestic Hygiene, with 20,000 of that designated for Berlin's <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>. One biographer noted her patronage of a festival in Berlin's Exhibition Park in June 1885 that brought in "thousands" for the same cause. Later that year Vicky's influence obtained use of Berlin's Rathaus for a major charitable bazaar to benefit multiple charities, including summer holidays. Henriette Schrader-Breymann of the Pestalozzi-Froebel House noted in her diary that the royal couple attended twice a day during the week-long extravaganza.[<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref52">52</reflink>]</p> <p>Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee and Fritz's fatal throat cancer kept Vicky away from Berlin from June 1887 through March 1888; in her absence, Empress Augusta served as nominal head of a bazaar to benefit the <emph>Kinderheilstätte</emph> in February 1888, even as her own husband's death approached. That same month, from their winter residence in San Remo, Fritz and Vicky sent in contributions for the fund-raising album, <emph>Im Luft und Sonne</emph>; hers was a short poem that stressed how assisting others in need could help one escape one's own woes. In the first weeks of her three-month reign as Empress, Vicky received representatives of the many philanthropies she protected, including the <emph>Kinderheilstätte</emph>. Widowed less than two months, on 13 August she wired greetings to a large international meeting of sponsors of country holidays convened at Zurich. Two years later, in October 1890, Mary Jane Brabazon, Countess Meath, held a long conversation about philanthropy with the Dowager Empress, noting, "[s]he has founded a society for providing children with holidays in the country, 'Verien [sic] Colonien'". During winter 1892 Vicky wrote to her daughter, Crown Princess Sophie of Greece, that she had attended "a large meeting" about country holidays where it was "stifling hot, but the people were so kind and civil, and received me so well, that I was quite touched and gratified". She reported that 25,000 German children had been sent out in 1891, at a cost of one million marks. Four years later, Jewish philanthropist James Simon donated an 80–90 bed "summer home" in Kolberg, named for Vicky and her late husband.[<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref53">53</reflink>]</p> <p>The 40 years leading up to the First World clearly witnessed an international movement supporting summer holidays for poor children. Increasing urbanisation produced slum housing, unsafe food supplies, and limited access to recreation for city children; limited understanding of the aetiology of diseases such as tuberculosis combined with a romanticised view of rural life to create a vision of weeks in the country as both curative and restorative. Philanthropists in major European and American cities also hoped for moral improvement of children through contact with "respectable" homes or supervised group vacations. In the United States, an additional motivation was bringing children of immigrants into contact with "true" America beyond the slums of the coastal cities.</p> <p>Hester Barron's study of the CCHF and Julia Guarneri's of the Fresh Air Fund stress the continuity of general aims extending well into the interwar period, even as perceptions of childhood, disease, and socialisation evolved. Both organisations remained private, even as cooperation with city schools increased.</p> <p>Thilo Rauch, in contrast, viewed World War I as an end for philanthropic <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>: massive food shortages made nutrition a problem for almost everyone, and state intervention led to many times more urban children being sent to rural areas than had been possible before the war. Some colony facilities were taken over as barracks or hospitals; others were purchased from philanthropic groups by cities at bargain prices. After the war, both runaway inflation and the increased state role in youth welfare made revival of the pre-war models impossible.[<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref54">54</reflink>] Under the Third Reich, of course, the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls subsumed almost all youth work, including summer camps.</p> <p>Writing on France, Laura Lee Downs carried the history of the <emph>colonies de vacances</emph> into the late twentieth century. She also documented transitions "from charitable work bestowed by late-nineteenth-century do-gooders on meritorious but sickly proletarian children, to a robust institution of popular education in interwar France, to the preferred institution by which children's universal 'right' to health, happiness, sunshine, games, and a piece of the French countryside was disbursed across the households of France". She even argued that colonies had a golden age from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, as middle-class children benefited from the "trickle-up" of a phenomenon not originally intended for them.[<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref55">55</reflink>] In her focus on the role of municipal governments in Ivry and Suresnes during the interwar years, however, the fate of the original philanthropies such as the <emph>Oeuvres de Trois Semaines</emph> and the <emph>Chaussée de Maine</emph> went unexplored.</p> <p>In the course of the twentieth century, many of the conditions that produced the movement for summer holidays changed significantly. Safer food supplies, better understanding of the causes and cures of diseases, greater opportunities for physical activities in schools or through youth sports and parks' programmes, and the much expanded possibilities for family vacations all reduced the perceptions of crisis that arose in the 1870s. Yet both the CCHF and Fresh Air Fund continue into the twenty-first century.</p> <p>From today's perspective, three aspects of the movement stand out. First, despite confusions about priority, the rapid spread of such philanthropic endeavours through multiple societies and cities of significantly varying population is remarkable. Second, the predominant role of Protestant clergy as advocates and organisers of summer holidays, even in France, is somewhat surprising; one might have expected a greater role for physicians or teachers. Third, the willingness of thousands of parents to let their children stay with unfamiliar hosts for periods ranging up to two months indicates a level of faith in "the kindness of strangers" that we can scarcely imagine today.</p> <hd id="AN0143139691-2">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.</p> <hd id="AN0143139691-3">Correction Statement</hd> <p>This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.</p> <ref id="AN0143139691-4"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Walter Shepard Ufford, <emph>Fresh Air Charity in the United States</emph> (New York: Bonnell, Silver, &. Co., 1897); W.T. Stead, "Country Holidays for Poor Children," <emph>Review of Reviews</emph> 2, no. 9 (September 1890), 219–26; May [sic] Jeune, "The Poor Children's Holiday," <emph>Fortnightly Review</emph> 53 (June 1893), 846–55; Johannes Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph> (Frankfurt am Main: Dr Eduard Schnapper, 1902). See also Luise Jessen, "Sommerpflege," in <emph>Illustriertes Konversations-Lexikon der Frau</emph>, Rosalie Schoenfleiss and others, eds., 2 vols. (Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1900), 486–8.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Thilo Rauch, <emph>Die Ferienkolonienbewegung: Zur Geschichte der privaten Fürsorge im Kaiserreich</emph> (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1992); Laura Lee Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the</emph> Colonies de Vacances <emph>in France, 1880–1960</emph> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Hester Barron, "Changing Conceptions of the 'Poor Child': The Children's Country Holiday Fund, 1918–1939," <emph>Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth</emph> 9, no. 1 (2016): 29–47; Julia Guarneri, "Changing Strategies for Child Welfare, Enduring Beliefs about Childhood: The Fresh Air Fund, 1877–1926," <emph>The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era</emph> 11, no. 1 (2012): 27–70; Tobin Miller Shearer, <emph>Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America</emph> (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). On the early years of the CCHF, see Henrietta Barnett, <emph>Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends</emph>, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 9, 46–54; and Downs, <emph>Childhood</emph>, 15, 20. Downs rechristens Bion as "Wilhelm".</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Walter Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien und verwandte Bestrebungen auf dem Gebiete der Kinder-Gesundheitspflege</emph> (Zurich: Sekretariat der Züricher Ferienkolonien, 1901), esp. 159, 234–7. His information on the United States came almost completely from Ufford's <emph>Fresh Air Charity</emph>. More modest comparative material exists in Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 20–4.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref5" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 157, 52; and Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 37–41.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Barnett, <emph>Canon Barnett</emph>, 179; Willard Parsons, "The Story of the Fresh Air Fund," in <emph>The Poor in Great Cities: Their Problems and What is Being Done to Solve Them</emph>, ed. Robert Archer Woods (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895), 131–50, here 149; Ufford, <emph>Fresh Air Charity</emph>, 17. Parsons's article originally appeared in <emph>Scribner's Magazine</emph> in April 1891. Lloyd Burgess Sharp echoed Parsons's claim that the Fresh Air Fund "has been instrumental in starting similar activities in England, Scotland, and France": see Sharp, <emph>Education and the Summer Camp</emph> (New York: Teachers College, 1930), 8; Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 32, n. 10, cites Sharp; and Shearer, <emph>Two Weeks</emph>, 17 and 183, n 21, cites Guarneri on this influence. Shearer also turns Copenhagen into a Dutch city and moves the origin of Boston's Fresh Air Week to 1870: <emph>Two Weeks</emph>, 15–16.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref7" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Bion as cited in Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 49–50; Anthony Wohl, <emph>Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain</emph> (London: J.M. Dent, 1983), 51–2; Bee Wilson, <emph>Swindled: the Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee</emph> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 158; Jesse Battershall, <emph>Food Adulteration and its Detection</emph> (New York: E. & F.N. Spon, 1887), 50; John Spargo, <emph>The Common Sense of the Milk Question</emph> (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 84; and Upton Sinclair, <emph>The Jungle</emph> (New York: Jungle Publishing, 1906).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref8" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Richard J. Evans, <emph>Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910</emph> (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 165, 172; and Sigrid Stöckel, <emph>Säuglingsfürsorge zwischen sozialer Hygiene und Eugenik: Das Beispiel Berlins im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik</emph> (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 185.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" idref="ref9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 3; and Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 71–2.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> For one statement of the general view that such concerns arose in Britain only with the South African War of 1898–1901, see Carolyn Steedman, <emph>Childhood, Culture, and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931</emph> (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 67, 98–9.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Barnett, <emph>Canon Barnett</emph>, 178; Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 31; and Ufford, <emph>Fresh Air Charity</emph>, 11.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ufford, <emph>Fresh Air Charity</emph>, 11. He appeared to assume that Asian immigrants to the West Coast were unlikely to assimilate.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> F. Norris, "A Note on a Good Work," <emph>Macmillan's Magazine</emph> 49 (February 1884): 310.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 50; Barron, "Changing Conceptions," 32; Shearer, <emph>Two Weeks</emph>, 11–13; and Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 28.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Schoners Familienblatt, ed., <emph>In Luft und Sonne: Künstler- und Selbstschriften-Album</emph> (Berlin: J.H. Schoner, 1888); Mary Jeune, "Holidays for Poor Children," <emph>The New Review</emph> 2, no. 12 (May 1890): 455–65, here 464. The German album contains hundreds of entries, including drawings and sketches, poems, and adages, submitted by members of most German royal houses, leading artists and writers, and notables such as General Helmut von Moltke.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 211; Meinolf Nitsch, <emph>Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine im Kaiserreich: Die praktische Umsetzung der Bürgerlichen Sozialreform in Berlin</emph> (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 112; year-by-year breakdowns in Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 71.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Leslie Paris, <emph>Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp</emph> (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 3, 17–9, 189–93.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Parsons, "The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund," 133, 142.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 14, 195; Jessen, "Sommerpflege," 488; Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 221; Nitsch, <emph>Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine</emph>, 133–4; Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 22. Luise Jessen, an important figure in Berlin's organisation, noted that "milk cures", "city colonies", and "half colonies" were used interchangeably: "Űber Fereien-Kolonien," in Rosalie Schoenflies et al., eds., <emph>Die internationale Kongress für Frauenwerke und Frauenbestrebungen in Berlin, 19. bis 26 September 1896</emph> (Berlin: H. Walther, 1897), 250.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "Politics and Society," <emph>Leeds Mercury</emph>, July 3, 1884, 5; "Children's Country Holidays," <emph>The British Medical Journal</emph>, no. 1425 (June 30, 1888), 1395; and Parsons, "The Story of the Fresh Air Fund," 138.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Parsons, "The Story of the Fresh Air Fund," 143, 148.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 33, 64, 256; Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 91; Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 186; Nitsch, <emph>Private Wohltätigskeits-vereine</emph>, 13; and Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 46.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Fereienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 43, 177; Ufford, <emph>Fresh Air Charity</emph>, 17; Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 41; Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 19–20, 27, 89; and Bion, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 188. Bergknecht indicates that by 1899, the city of Paris paid 70% of the costs of these school-linked colonies: <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 22.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Amélie Sohr, <emph>Frauenarbeit in der Armen- und Krankenpflege, Daheim und im Auslande: Geschichtliches und kritisches</emph> (Berlin: J. Springer, 1882), 51–2; Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 187 <emph>et passim</emph>; Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 15n. For Varrentrapp's many public health activities, see Brian Ladd, <emph>Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914</emph> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 39, 43, 56, 141. For a "Christmas market" to benefit the Frankfurt colonies, held in 1885 by local artists and others, see Norbert Schrödl and Elsa Schrödl, <emph>Ein Kunstlerleben im Sonnenschein</emph> (Frankfurt am Main: Englart and Schlösser, 1922), 313.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> A.A. Strange-Butson, "Country Holidays for City Children," <emph>Good Words</emph> 24 (December 1883), 262–3; and "Children's Country Holidays," <emph>The British Medical Journal</emph>, no. 1744 (June 2, 1894), 1204–5.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 52; Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 33; Benno Fromm, <emph>Die Wohltätigskeitsvereine in Berlin</emph> (Berlin: Vereins-Buchhandlung, 1894), 99; and Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 50.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 33 and n. 15; and Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 25.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bion, <emph>Die Fereienkolonien</emph>, 136, 151, 167, 179.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "Appeal for the Poor Children of Leeds," <emph>Leeds Mercury</emph>, June 12, 1885, 4; and Jeune, "Holidays for Poor Children," 458.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 20, 27, 42.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 106; Jeune, "Holidays for Poor Children," 462; and Shearer, <emph>Two Weeks</emph>, 23.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 52, 66; Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 123, 167; and Jessen, "Sommerpflege," 487.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Fromm, <emph>Wohltätigkeitsvereine</emph>, 99; and Nitsch, <emph>Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine</emph>, 131.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Parsons, "The Story of the Fresh Air Fund," 135–6; Cyril Jackson, "The Children's Country Holiday Fund and the Settlements," in <emph>The Universities and the Social Problem: An Account of the University Settlements in East London</emph>, ed. John Knapp (London: Rivington, Percival, 1895), 87–105, here 91, 95. For the resistance to intrusion, except by district nurses, see especially Ellen Ross, <emph>Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918</emph> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16–8, 49. Ross does not mention the CCHF.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Elizabeth Rossiter, "Country Life for Poor Town Children," <emph>Good Words</emph> 26 (December 1885), 357–9, quotation on 359. See also the obituary, W. Rossiter, "The Originator of 'Country Life for Poor Town Children,'" <emph>Good Words</emph> 29 (December 1888), 702–3.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jeune, "The Poor Children's Holiday," 850; C.S. Loch, "Children's Country Holidays," <emph>Times</emph>, September 10, 1896, 8; and Robert A. Woods, "The Social Awakening in London," in <emph>The Poor in Great Cities</emph>, 12–13.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 102–3; and Ufford, <emph>Fresh Air Charity</emph>, 3–4, 97.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jeune, "Holidays for Poor Children," 460.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 93; Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 138, 194, 224; "Children's Country Holidays," <emph>The British Medical Journal</emph>, (June 29, 1895): 1460. The Spanish government rather than private philanthropists opened a large ocean-side colony, connected with a sanatorium, at Coruna in the early twentieth century: José Manuel Dominguez García, "El medio natural como entorno educativo: Las colonias escolares en el Sanatorio de Oza" (paper presented at ISCHE 40, Berlin, August 2018).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jessen, "Sommerpflege," 488; and Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 39 and 39n. Berlin at least discussed such a programme in 1900.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Barnett, <emph>Canon Barnett</emph>, 180; Barron, "Changing Conceptions," 34, 38–9; and Shearer, <emph>Two Weeks</emph>, 101–3.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Parsons, "The Story of the Fresh Air Fund," 137; Jeune, "Holidays for Children," 459; and Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 51.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bion, <emph>Die Ferienkolonien</emph>, 11, 16, 116, 122; and Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, 35–6, 60–3, 65.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ufford, <emph>Fresh Air Charity</emph>, 39, 49; Parsons, "The Story of the Fresh Air Fund," 148; Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 50, 59. For the later period examined by Shearer, <emph>Two Weeks</emph>, 5, the "overwhelming majority of the children stayed in homes rather than camps".</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 15, 63, 37–9; Jessen, "Űber Ferien-Kolonien," 250; Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 223, 191 221; and Nitsch, <emph>Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine</emph>, 132–3.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Norris, "Note on a Good Work," 309; "Country Holidays for London Children," <emph>Times</emph> 25 July 1887, 9; L.T. Mead, "The Children's Country Holidays," <emph>Atalanta</emph> (1893), 707–11, here 710; Jeune, "The Poor Children's Holiday," 851; and Barnett, <emph>Canon Barnett</emph>, 187.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Edmund Verney, "Children's Country Holiday in France," <emph>Good Words</emph> 44 (December 1903), 43–51, citations on 48, 51.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Guarneri, "Changing Strategies," 36 and n. 38, suggests that as of 1914 the Fresh Air Fund paid hosts between $2.50 and $4.00 per week.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jackson, "The Children's Country Holiday Fund," 96; Meade, "The Children's Country Holiday," 710; Jeune, "Holidays for Poor Children," 456; Rossiter, "The Originator," 703: Jessen, "Sommerpflege," 488; and Bergknecht, <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>, 17.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 41; and Sohr, <emph>Frauenarbeit</emph>, 56.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 194–6; Nitsch, <emph>Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine</emph>, 395–6; Mary Lyschinska, <emph>Henriette Schrader-Breymann: Ihr Leben aus Briefen und Tagebüchern zusammengestellt und erläutert</emph>, 2 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922), 2: 35; and Sohr, <emph>Frauenarbeit</emph>, 54–5. Proceeds from Sohr's book benefitted the <emph>Ferienkolonien</emph>.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Margarete Poschinger, <emph>Kaiser Friedrich in neuer quellenmässiger Darstellung</emph>, 3 vols. (Berlin: R. Schröder, 1899), 3: 317; and Lyschinska, <emph>Schrader-Breymann</emph>, 2: 315–7.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Petra Wilhelmy, <emph>Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert (1780–1914)</emph> (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), 258; Rudolf Vierhaus, <emph>Das Tagebuch der Baronin Spitzemberg: Aufzeichungungen aus der Hofgesellschaft des Hohenzollernreiches</emph> (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1960), 235, 247; <emph>Im Luft und Sonne</emph>, 9–10; Rauch, <emph>Ferienkolonienbewegung</emph>, 203; Reginald Meath, <emph>Memories of the 19th Century</emph> (New York: J. Murray, 1923), 284; Arthur Gould Lee, <emph>The Empress Frederick Writes to Sophie, Her Daughter</emph> (London: Faber & Faber, 1955), 110; and Zentrale für private Fürsorge, Berlin, <emph>Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen Berlins</emph>, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1907), 232.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rauch, <emph>Die Ferienkoloniebewegung</emph>, 282–6.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Downs, <emph>Childhood in the Promised Land</emph>, xiv–xv.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By James C. Albisetti</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> <p></p> <p>James C. Albisetti is the author of two books and of over 40 articles and chapters. He served six years as associate editor of History of Education Quarterly , five years as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, and in 2002–2003 as President of the History of Education Society (USA).</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref24"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref27"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref31"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref32"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref36"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref37"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref38"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref39"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib40" firstref="ref40"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref41"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref42"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib43" firstref="ref43"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref44"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib45" firstref="ref45"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib46" firstref="ref46"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl38" bibid="bib47" firstref="ref47"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl39" bibid="bib48" firstref="ref48"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl40" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref49"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl41" bibid="bib50" firstref="ref50"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl42" bibid="bib51" firstref="ref51"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl43" bibid="bib52" firstref="ref52"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl44" bibid="bib53" firstref="ref53"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl45" bibid="bib54" firstref="ref54"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl46" bibid="bib55" firstref="ref55"></nolink>
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  Data: Sending City Children to the Country: Vacations in 'Nature' ca. 1870-1900
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Albisetti%2C+James+C%2E%22">Albisetti, James C.</searchLink>
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Paedagogica+Historica%3A+International+Journal+of+the+History+of+Education%22"><i>Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education</i></searchLink>. 2020 56(1-2):70-84.
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Data: 15
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  Data: 2020
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  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative
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  Label: Descriptors
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+History%22">Educational History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Foreign+Countries%22">Foreign Countries</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Urban+Areas%22">Urban Areas</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Rural+Areas%22">Rural Areas</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Summer+Programs%22">Summer Programs</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Child+Health%22">Child Health</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22At+Risk+Students%22">At Risk Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Resident+Camp+Programs%22">Resident Camp Programs</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Natural+Resources%22">Natural Resources</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Vacations%22">Vacations</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Body+Weight%22">Body Weight</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Program+Effectiveness%22">Program Effectiveness</searchLink>
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  Data: 10.1080/00309230.2019.1675729
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  Data: 0030-9230
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  Data: The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a new but rapidly spreading perspective on the link between education and nature: middle-class philanthropists joining together to provide summer vacations in the countryside for poor, sickly, urban children. Drawing on numerous examples of such work in Europe and the United States, this essay highlights the common traits and local variations of these programmes designed to improve the physical health and often the moral tone of such endangered children. It highlights in particular the fundamental disagreements over whether it was better to house such children in the homes of rural families or to keep them together in groups under the supervision of teachers or other adults. In conclusion, it examines the important role of a single patron, the Prussian/German Crown Princess Victoria.
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      Pagination:
        PageCount: 15
        StartPage: 70
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      – SubjectFull: Educational History
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Foreign Countries
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      – SubjectFull: Urban Areas
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Rural Areas
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Summer Programs
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Child Health
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: At Risk Students
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Resident Camp Programs
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Natural Resources
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Vacations
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Body Weight
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Program Effectiveness
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      – SubjectFull: United States
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Europe
        Type: general
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      – TitleFull: Sending City Children to the Country: Vacations in 'Nature' ca. 1870-1900
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