Sarah Bradley, the pandemic of 1918/19 and GMC, then and now

 In 1917 my grandmother, Sarah Bradley, was 19 years old and had founded Green Mountain Camp for Girls with her friend, Grace Holbrook. During the following two years the fledgling camp faced the unimaginable challenge of getting its roots established as the “Spanish Influenza” ravaged the United States.

My grandmother lost her mother to the pandemic. I can’t imagine the emotional pain and stress she and her surviving family endured. But endure they did. I know of one life-long consequence that young Sarah had to face. After the matriarchal death in her immediate family, she had to drop her plans to attend college and take her mother’s role as head of the family household and care for her father and younger sisters.

Sarah eventually married and had a family of her own, but her dream of higher education never came to pass. I remember hearing from my mother that this was always a sad regret for my grandmother, an unwelcome hole in her sense of self. Nonetheless she accomplished much. She raised a family, was a wonderful poet and illustrator, a life long advocate of equal rights (she attended Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963) and co-founded another organization that, like Green Mountain Camp, still thrives today, Pathfinder International.

Sarah and Grace founded Green Mountain Camp with the intention of giving girls an opportunity to better understand themselves and others, to try new things and to test themselves. It must have taken a tremendous will to keep the newly established camp going in 1918 and 1919. But they did. And their spirited intention has never left the camp, even now. Especially now.

The consequences of this current pandemic along with the other great stresses of this moment in history have brought on difficult challenges for the camp. We decided not to have a traditional in-person camp season due to the risks of COVID-19 but created a robust virtual camp activities program that was managed by an energetic staff. GMC girls stayed connected to the camp community and the community at large likewise stayed connected to the camp.

The daunting circumstances of this historic year offered all of us administering and staffing the camp an opportunity to rise to the challenge and see how we could do our best, individually and collectively. That’s what Sarah Bradley and the first supporters of GMC did a century ago and would be so proud that we were able to follow suit today.

Richard A. Epstein

September 14, 2020