Sporting camp

A sporting camp is an establishment that provides lodging, meals and guide service for hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation and usually consists of a set of “camps” or cabins accompanied by a main lodge (which may or may not have guest rooms). Some also offer primitive outpost cabins. Traditionally found in forests and on lakes in remote locations throughout the state of Maine, sporting camps are a popular lodging destination that have offered a unique outdoors experience to sportsmen across New England and throughout the United States for over a century.

Sporting camps and wilderness lodges allow uniquely easy access to outdoor recreational activities and licensed, Registered Maine Guides along with the opportunity to experience camaraderie with like-minded visitors and a closeness with the surrounding natural environment. Although many sporting camps lack modern amenities such as electricity, indoor plumbing or cell phone coverage, they appeal to those who seek the historic tradition of a Maine wilderness experience.

From colonial times through the early years of statehood, Maine's location off the main routes of travel was perceived as a narrow strip of coastal development with primitive living conditions in the interior. In 1846, Henry David Thoreau described every log hut in the woods as a public house. The camps and accompanying hovels for the cattle were barely distinguishable except the camps had a chimney. Beneath the chimney a fire was built on the dirt floor and surrounded by benches of split logs. When recreational hunting became more popular with increased civilian ownership of firearms following the American Civil War, hunting and fishing opportunities of the Maine North Woods encouraged development of interior sporting camps as an alternative to resort facilities along the Maine coast.

Sporting camps were often built beside lakes so the breeze off the open water might blow away some of the black flies, mosquitoes, deer flies and midges which swarm in still air from late spring through early autumn. A 1938 list of camps served by the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad included Bear Mountain and Pleasant Lake Camps, Big Lyford Pond Camps, Camp Chesuncook, Harford's Point Camps, Jerry Pond Camps, Kidney Pond Camps, Lily Bay House, Little Lyford Pond Camps, Pleasant Point Camps, Point of Pine Camps, Rainbow Lake Sporting Camps, Scraggly Lake Sporting Camps, Seboomook House, Shinn Pond House, Spencer Bay Camp, Umcolus Lake Camps, West Branch Pond Camps, West Outlet Camps, Wilson Pond Camps, and Yoke Pond Camps named for water features. Sporting camps served anglers from ice out through the summer and hunters until after the autumn frost; but were often vacant and unheated through the winter months when freezing temperatures might damage indoor plumbing. Flush toilets were uncommon enough to be mentioned in advertisements when available and a 1938 survey of roadside advertising noted very few.

...
Wikipedia