Camp Walden On the Waterfront
Looking Back
Throughout 2026, our anniversary year, this website will updated with articles and photos looking back on the history of the lakes. This page features a reminiscence of Camp Walden, a 7-week, traditional overnight summer camp for girls ages 8-15 located on Sand Pond. The reminiscence was written by Genie Silver, who first attended the camp in 1959 as a 9-year-old. Genie and Michael Silver have a camp on Hancock Pond.
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For a complete history of Camp Walden, visit the Camp Walden website.
Click through to read a history of Camp Blazing Trail.
Click through to read a history of Camp Wabunaki
Camp Walden Memories
By Genie Silver
The following interview with Helen Herz, longtime director of Camp Walden on Sand Pond, was written by Genie Silver for the June 1999 edition of the Hancock & Sand Ponds Newsletter.
When I was nine years old and living in Baltimore, Maryland, Miss Helen Herz, a woman with blue eyes, white hair, and lively manner, came to my home with a treasure trove of slides of Camp Walden, a girls’ camp she directed in Denmark, Maine. After seeing the amazingly tall and beautiful pine trees, the lake front with a large sandy beach, docks, canoes, sailboats, and water skiing equipment, I was smitten! Also, there was the Ark, the massive brown wood building which housed the theatre, dance and basketball activities, and the meandering brown bunk houses built on gentle, pine-needled slopes where girls from nine to fifteen lived for eight weeks. She told me about the camping trips to mountains and lakes and the weekends full of team sports - well, that was it for me. I made a sign and put it up above my bed at home: “June 26th, 1959, will be the most exciting day of my life!” - the day I was to leave for camp on the overnight train from New York City.
Now, it is almost 40 years later and I am still having a love affair with Camp Walden and the Lake Region, so much so that my husband and I bought land on Hancock Pond and built a home there. I can still canoe to Camp Walden for Schnecken (a cinnamon sweet roll) on Sunday mornings! In fact, on a warm July morning this past summer, I went to Walden and after filling up on a traditional Sunday morning feast of Schnecken, I climb the old, worn pine staircase of Camp Walden’s Main Building to meet with Miss Herz, now 84, and interview her about the history of the camp.
Miss Herz, whose aunt, Blanche Hirsch, founded the camp in 1916 with her partner, Clara Altschuler, began attending Camp Walden in 1925, and took over as camp director in 1938. Wendy Cohen, Miss Herz’s daughter, is now Walden’s director, but it was clear as soon as I entered the second floor camp office, that Miss Herz is as indomitable as ever. Counselors and campers alike sought her opinions on where to buy certain supplies and when to photograph the campers, whose mothers, aunts and grandmothers attended the camp.
Because I was interviewing Miss Herz for the Hancock & Sand Ponds Association, she insisted that before we talk about Walden’s history, she tell me the story of the Hancock Pond Dam. The dam, constructed of logs and wood, was originally built by a Hiram lumber mill that used the dammed water as a power source. . . . When the lumber company closed in the 1940s it decided to sell the dam. Walden bought 50% of the shares, Camp Blazing Trail bought some shares, as did other lake residents.
In summer, a quiet battle ensued in which lake swimmers dislodged and removed logs from the dam so more water would flow out and there would be a larger public beach. Once or twice a week, Walden maintenance workers replaced the logs. In the winter, all the wooden logs were removed so the ice wouldn’t destroy them. Finally, in the late 1950s, the state of Maine determined that all dams must be made of concrete and at that point, due to the prohibitive cost of building and maintaining such a dam, Walden got out of the dam business and sold all its shares to the lake residents.
At Walden, a brass bell located just outside one of the office windows rings throughout the day to remind campers and counselors that a new activity is beginning or that it’s time for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. As I listened to this long familiar sound, Miss Herz began to talk about Walden’s beginnings. Blanche Hirsch and Clara Altschuler were followers of Henry Thoreau and they found that though camps in the North Woods existed in the early 1900s for underprivileged children, the children of greater wealth had little to do in the summer. So, in the winter of 1915, they came to Maine and searched for land they could buy to start a camp. Miss Herz reports that the lumbermen who sold them the 45 acres and nearly one mile of lake front on Sand Pond for $800 thought the two were “stupid New York women.” (They were hardly that: Blanche Hirsch was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Barnard College and she ran a private school for girls, grades one through 12 in New York City, called Alcuin.)
When Blanche and Clara bought the land, it was lumbered to the extent that one could see all the way from the lake to the camp entrance on Berry Road. Miss Herz thinks that Wyonigonic was founded about ten years before Walden, and Blazing Trail came a few years later. Eugenia Parker, the director of Blazing Trail (a camp no longer in existence that occupied land on both Sand and Hancock Ponds) was a very special woman. Blazing Trail was a girls camp that emphasized water sports and outdoor living. The girls crafted their own paddles and spent a full month canoeing on the lakes in preparation for a trip up the Allagash.
Nineteen Sixteen was the first summer Walden opened to campers, age 16-18. There were five bunk houses and 35 campers. Miss Herz said that it was the mother of George Booth (owner of part of Douglas Hill) who helped them design the camp layout. Because Blanche Hirsch did not believe young women should be roaming the woods in the dark of night, she had indoor plumbing installed in each bunk house for toilets and sinks. This was unusual for the time. Most camps used outhouses.
Miss Herz had so much to tell me about days past that we agreed she would talk about more memorable events before World War II, and at a later time the would spend more time talking about the post-war years.What I found most interesting was the trauma of the polio epidemic years, in the 1920s. One year was so dangerous that no one other than the campers and counselors were allowed in and out of camp - all supplies were picked up in Denmark.
In the 1930s, the whole area was devastated by a terrible hurricane. President Roosevelt ordered the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) men up to Denmark to help clear the land and help rebuild. Miss Herz reports that the town, distrustful of FDR and his liberal brand of politics, were leery of the CCC. Many of the men stayed at Walden.
In 1938, the Governor of Maine came to town to speak in front of the Town Hall and the whole camp turned out to see him. In response, in true politician’s style, he remarked: “The pig population in Denmark may be down, but the population of pretty girls is certainly up!”
Miss Herz had many stories to tell, but one I’ll close with is about the original caretaker of Camp Walden, a Mr. Wentworth. His family in the Denmark area dates back to the American Revolution. Miss Herz sometimes stayed at his home (a farmhouse before the Monument, on the right near the Ingall’s home). She loved the secret compartment in the house that led to the barn and allowed the family to escape in case of attack by unfriendly visitors.
And remember Mr. Pendexter, the Justice of the Peace and telephone operator? Well, Helen Herz was his good friend and used to sit with him while he connected one telephone party to the next - Miss Herz was privy to all the town gossip!
The Main Lodge
Ms. Herz with Counselors & a Camper