Shirley township

How Beacon Lodge Began

The camp's 1973 anniversary pamphlet credits its founder, who had seriously impaired vision since birth, with starting Beacon Lodge, the summer camp for blind people near Mount Union. The founder graduated from the Overbrook School for the Blind in Philadelphia in 1936. He later became a home teacher for the State Council for the Blind in the Huntingdon, Mifflin and Juniata County area, with headquarters in Lewistown. He organized the Juniata Foundation for the Blind, which was incorporated on February 28, 1945, and in March 1946 he left the state job to become its full time executive director.

By the founder's own account in that pamphlet, the camp began in 1947, when twelve blind people met in the office of the Pennsylvania Federation of the Blind to talk about the need for a summer camp. He chaired the research committee and contacted the sixteen camps for the blind then known. A rabbi in Lewistown told him of a property near Mount Union available for $12,500, and he went to see it on January 29, 1948. That April a committee reported that it would be a pretty big undertaking for the Federation and suggested that he form a corporation to develop the camp. The Mifflin County Court chartered the corporation on August 16, 1948. An editor's note in the pamphlet gives its original name as Vacations for the Blind.

In the spring of 1949 the group bought a year's option on the property, and that year it ran a three week experimental season with a group of blind people. Lions Clubs helped raise the money, and the property was bought on March 1, 1950, with a first mortgage. The first official season opened on July 6, 1950, and ran six weeks. For the first ten years the camp took adults only. Children first came in 1959, when an experimental camp took ten of them for the first two weeks of the season and forty more in the last two weeks of August. The pamphlet places the camp in Wayne Township, Mifflin County.

Checked against the record. We checked two accounts from the camp itself, both on archive.org: its 25th anniversary pamphlet of 1973, which holds the founder's own history of the camp and a profile of him, and an article by the founder, Camping for Blind People, cataloged as about 1960. The dates and figures come from the page images. We do not name the founder, because the founder may still be living and no source we read records a death. We also left out a 1950 newspaper item, since it does not name the camp. Nearly all of this is the camp's account of its own founding. We have not seen the charter, the deeds or the seller, and we could not confirm what the property was called before the camp. The pamphlet says Vacations for the Blind was the corporation's original name, yet both accounts speak of Beacon Lodge as the body chartered in 1948, so the name on the charter stays open until the court file is seen. The camp's own acreage and 1950 attendance figures differ from one another, so the story gives none of them.

Sources

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

← All stories from Shirley township

Have something to add to this story, or a photograph of it? Send it here →

Photographs from Shirley township