Camp Wabunaki cabin overlooking Hancock Pond
Looking Back
Throughout 2026, our anniversary year, this page will updated with articles and photos looking back on the history of the lakes. This page features a brief history and reminiscence of Camp Wabunaki, a girls camp that was located on Hancock Pond near the boat launch and on the nearby island. The reminiscence was written by the late Eleanor Neily, who attended the camp in 1933 as an 11-year-old. The Neilys had one of the first camps on Hancock Pond.
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We are grateful to Lee Shand, curator of the Denmark Historical Society, and Donelle Allen, curator of the Sebago Historical Society, for their help in locating photos of Camp Wabunaki and Blazing Trail.
For more details about the Camp Wabunaki's history, download the Sebago Historial Society's 2023 Calendar
Click through to read a history of Camp Blazing Trail.
Camp Wabunaki
Camp Wabunaki, a camp for girls on the shores of Hancock Pond, was established in 1910. According to the Sebago Historical Society, land for the camp was leased from Dr. William Blackman, who in 1905 bought property near what is now the Hancock Pond boat launch, including the island just off the shoreline and the causeway leading to it, with the idea of making it a summer camp.
Camp Wabunaki was open to girls age 11-18, who stayed for July and August.
In the first years it hosted 18 campers. During the 1920s Dr.
Blackman bought more land along the shore and leased it to the camp on favorable terms, bringing it to about 300 acres. At that time it was managed by Emily Welch, who divided the camp into two parts, Puk-Wabunaki (Small Wabunaki) for younger girls, and a camp on the island for older girls. Together they hosted about 100 campers.
According to the Sebago Historical Society, “Miss Welch became prominent in the camping movement of the 1920s and ’30s, and the philosophy and practice she developed at Wabunaki influenced camps through the East and Midwest. Her girls, she said, came to camp"to build up their soul’s fabric.” The camp closed in 1963.
Sue Neily’s mother, Eleanor Neily, attended the camp as a young girl and later wrote the following reminiscence.
Photo: Dr. William Blackman, who leased the land to the camps on favorable terms.
Camp Wabunaki Memories
by Eleanor Neily
I first came to Puk-Wabunaki in 1933 as an 11-year-old junior camper. The camp was situated on Hancock Pond in the cove across from the senior girls camp on the island.
That first year the “Dinky”, as we called the narrow gauge railroad,
delivered the campers from New York and points west. They had come up on the sleeper, “The State of Maine,” transferred to another train to Hiram, and then onto the Dinky, which delivered them to Hancock Pond. The whole camp would walk up to greet them. I think that was the last year they came by that route.
There were very few camps on Hancock Pond then. (Never Hancock Lake!) The shelters where we learned camp crafts were in the cove just beyond Puk-Wabunaki, on the point where Dr. Hall built his camp, and on the high bluff where Dr. Kraushaar built his camp. The whole pond and hills and streams were our playground. Merle Weeman, whose mother was the cook at junior camp (and what a cook!), and Everett Parsons were the handymen and camp truck drivers. Ephraim Chessey, fondly known as Ephy, kept both camps functioning. They could never have gotten along without them.
Dr. Blackman made possible all of Wabunaki, generously giving the land. He used to come down to visit the camp from his summer home on Douglas Hill each year and this is the song we sang to him: “Some say fairy godfathers disappeared long ago,
But as we look around our camp we can prove ’tis not so. Dr. Blackman we found that you make fairy tales come true, And in each gay time, such happy play time, We are grateful again to you.”
Miss Emily Hamilton Welch, the owner and director of the camps, from Buffalo, N.Y., made a deep impression on all her girls. She always expected us to be the very best we could. Most of us owe her a great debt of gratitude. Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories” were great favorites of hers, and she told them to us around the campfire. “How the Elephant Got HIs Trunk” and “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin” were special favorites. Sucker Brook was always called “The Limpopo River,” as in: “The great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees,” from “How the Elephant Got His Trunk.”
On calm nights, the whole camp would go out on the lake in canoes and Miss Welch would instruct us about the stars and constellations. Alas, in spite of having an astro-physicist son, the only constellation I can identify is The Big Dipper.
Photo right: Emily Welch, long time director of Camp Wabunaki.
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