In 1924, San Antonian Mattie Wilson Landry had a vision for young Black girls to experience the empowerment and adventure of camping outdoors.
When the national Camp Fire Girls organization denied her inclusion because of her color, Landry founded her own group, Camp Founder Girls.
Landry and fellow camp counselors would lead girls through outdoor games and exercises, and build camaraderie. The first camp hosted 75 girls, many of whom would later return as counselors as the camp grew to accommodate more than 150 campers.
After four decades of growth and success fostering self-confidence and community among young Black girls, the camp shut down when Landry retired in 1964, and then she died 10 years later.
More than 50 years later, Alex Bailey, founder of the San Antonio-based Black Outside nonprofit that fosters connection of Black youth to nature, revived Camp Founder Girls.
That first year, 35 campers attended. That number doubled in the camp’s second year, then more than doubled again in subsequent years, running annually at capacity with a 70-family waiting list.
Echoing the earlier version of Camp Founder Girls, Bailey said girls who started as campers return to become camp counselors guiding younger girls, with 30 alumni campers serving as counselors in recent years.
“We joke that it feels like a Black family reunion, right in the outdoors. And that’s our vision,” Bailey said.
Forming lifelong bonds
Family has been at the heart of Camp Founder Girls since its beginnings. With the help of her community at St. Paul United Methodist Church, Landry purchased seven acres of land near Boerne and established Camp Elvira, named in honor of her mother.
Cabins were constructed out of old wooden wagons, as well as a mess building and an outhouse.
Gaynell Sylvia Sapenter Gainer attended those 1950s-era camps. She recalls campers wading in a nearby creek, gathering wood, leaves and wildflowers for campfires and crafts, and experiencing close community with other Black girls her age.
Gainer said Landry taught self-respect to campers, instilled confidence, encouraged their creativity and advised them to choose their friends wisely.
Gainer has dedicated much energy and volunteer spirit to the revival of her beloved Camp Founder Girls, and maintains lifelong bonds with fellow campers, visible in the Camp Founder Girls Centennial Special documentary made in 2023 by filmmaker Contessa Gayles.
A safe space
Gayles said she first learned of Camp Founder Girls in an NPR story that briefly mentioned it as believed to be among the first summer camps for Black girls in the country. The pioneering history of Landry, a Black woman in the segregated South acquiring property to empower young Black girls, is what attracted her to the story.
She then saw Gainer in the San Antonio-produced Walk On The River documentary and included her in the half-hour, Queen Latifah-produced Founder Girls documentary film and its three-part centennial-focused follow-up that aired on BET July 1.
Gainer is “one of the surviving elders that has really taken it upon herself to become a historian of the camp and of her own experience,” Gayles said, citing the value of Gainer’s meticulous record-keeping and memories of Landry.
Gayles formed an all-women of color and majority black women film crew to gain an immersive perspective by following campers from wake up until lights out, and captured a range of experiences from fear of riding a horse for the first time to the triumph of confidently ziplining — while making jokes — for an adoring crowd below.
Gayles said she wanted her film to portray the camp’s role as a safe space for Black girls to be free and affirmed in their identity as they prepare to face challenges out in the world. And, importantly, “I really wanted to tell a story about Black joy, because a lot of storytelling about our communities tends to focus on our traumas.”
One moment in the film focuses on chalk drawings made by campers, including a message in large bright blue letters that reads “Black girl magic,” which Gayles defined as “all that we encapsulate in terms of our beauty, our joy, our swag, our intelligence, our confidence, the way that we set trends, the way that we take care of our communities, all of the things that we do as black women,” including hard work, perseverance and sacrifices.
Those experiences include not only the discrimination faced by Landry’s generation, but similar manifestations that occur today, a balance Bailey navigates as he encourages Black San Antonians to feel they belong in spaces traditionally perceived as inaccessible.
As recently as 2018, only 2% of visitors to U.S. national parks and 1% of Texas State Park participants identified as Black, ratios Bailey intends to help change.
“What can we do to change that number?” Bailey asked. “I believe that starts with youth programming. If we can get youth inspired to connect to these spaces, to protect these spaces, to find joy in these spaces, then they’re going to be the future leaders, recreators, enthusiasts that will help connect the next generation to the outdoors.”
Kaitlyn Williams, 18, has attended Camp Founder Girls since its revival in 2019. Recalling that her first camp was the first time she had ever been to a weeklong outdoors summer camp, she said, “the first night was rough,” mainly in that everything was new to her. But being immersed with girls her own age helped her quickly adapt so that “morning of day two I was right at home.”
All campers learn the four pillars of Camp Founder Girls: Confident, Creative, Brave, Strong, but Williams brings them all together as learning self-love.
“That’s definitely been a big part of me ever since Camp Founder Girls became part of my life,” she said.
Like many former campers, Williams will return next year as a camp counselor. Having been through the experience, she said she’ll impart an important lesson on the young girls she’ll be guiding.
“I want them to know that it’s okay to feel every emotion,” she said. Many campers arrive feeling closed off, she said, unsure of what to expect or how to adapt. “But once it hits day five, the end of camp, you can see how they become more open, more energetic, more vibrant … they’ve realized that it’s okay to have every emotion that they’re feeling.”
Building the future
Under the care of Bailey, Camp Founder Girls looks to its past to build its future. He said a new Juneteenth-focused fundraising effort will be undertaken for the cause of purchasing a new plot of land as a home for future camps, since Landry’s original acreage was sold decades ago and the camp had since moved from site to site.
Bailey is grateful to have housed the annual camp at Morgan’s Wonderland for the past three years, which he said has helped offer an array of activities to campers including archery, swimming, rock-climbing, bungee-jumping and ziplining.
But “we’re bursting at the seams,” he said. “Our demand is way higher than our supply of camping space.” The waiting list is growing and the airing of Gayles’s documentaries has spurred a wave of interest from across the country, he said. The local camp already attracts families from Florida, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Arizona and other locales, and Bailey sees potential in building camps in California and the East Coast.
But he intends Texas to be the home of Camp Founder Girls long into the future, to honor Landry’s legacy and the unique role of Texas in Black history. A forthcoming capital campaign to build a new home base will be called Camp 619, Bailey said, in honor of the month and day Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived to Galveston in 1865 to declare all Black Americans free – two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
And the future of Camp Founder Girls looks bright in the hands of alumni such as Williams, who said the legacy of campfire girls holds “an immense significance for me, since it nurtures a remarkable transformation in each camper. … It creates a powerful sense of sisterhood and belonging that resonates deeply with someone like me.”
