Beacon Historical Society opens exhibit on Camp Nitgedaiget

Just 2 miles south of Beacon, working-class Jewish progressives and Communist sympathizers from New York City gathered for over 30 years at a 250-acre refuge in Dutchess Junction.

Amid ballfields, hiking trails and clusters of bungalows, they exercised, socialized, read the Community Party USA's Daily Worker newspaper, listened to lectures by socialist writers and enjoyed performances by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

That history is the foundation of Beacon's Camp Nitgedaiget: A Vanished Utopia, an exhibit running through November at the Beacon Historical Society. Two galleries filled with photos, postcards, newspaper clippings and artifacts found at the site are devoted to Nitgedaiget, founded in 1922 by immigrant garment workers as one of dozens of socially progressive camps in New York state.

A third gallery highlights a housing cooperative comprising more than 700 apartments they built in the Bronx, with materials borrowed from the Bronx County Historical Society.

Diane Lapis, a BHS trustee, began rebuilding the history of Nitgedaiget ("no worries" in Yiddish) a decade ago, after a friend from the organization found, in the Library of Congress, photos of the camp taken in 1937. "Besides fresh air and sunshine, there were physical activities - they had winter sports, summer sports," Lapis said.

Participants in the camp's theater productions performed songs based on "proletarian" themes, such as "socialism, communism and working together - developing strength and unity to work against the big bosses," she said.

Nitgedaiget's roots began in 1910, when garment workers living in the tenements of New York City's Lower East Side formed the United Workers Cooperative Association. Members sought improved living and working conditions and embraced civil rights, social security and health and unemployment insurance.

The Dutchess Junction property, now part of Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve, straddled Route 9D. Its west side featured a four-story, 56-room hotel, a dining hall, sports facilities, a lake and access to fishing and boating on the Hudson River; the east had a pool and waterfall, hundreds of bungalows, platform tents and a gathering hall for dancing, entertainment and lectures.

Because of its Communist sympathies, "there was always a lens on the camp," said Lapis. In 1927, the camp managers received a letter from the Ku Klux Klan demanding that they "withdraw from this territory or else we will take severe measures against you." Hamilton Fish III, the congressman from Philipstown who crusaded against Communism, dispatched representatives to investigate the camp.

Several factors contributed to Nitgedaiget's demise in the 1950s, Lapis said, including financial mismanagement and disillusionment with the Communist Party after Russia's Joseph Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. In addition, the children of Nitgedaiget's first generation of working-class campers began to go to college and move into white-collar jobs.

"They now have a car, or access to other ways of vacationing, so that the original intention of the camp changes," she said.

The Beacon Historical Society, at 61 Leonard St., is open from 10 a.m. to noon on Thursdays and 1 to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. See beaconhistorical.org.