From 1953 to 1991, the Camp Howard Retreat Center near Lake of the Woods was operated by a group of religious and community groups associated with the University of Illinois. Members of the organization included the Baptist Student Foundation, Baptist Student Union, Channing-Murray Foundation, Disciples Foundation, Friends Meeting, Free Methodist, Hillel Foundation, McKinley Foundation, Seabury Foundation, University YMCA, University YWCA, and the Wesley Foundation.

Our records include annual meeting minutes and correspondence about camp usage, finances, care and upkeep of the facilities, and plans for a building that would provide a kitchen and toilets and be “winterized” for year-round use.

Starting in 1953, surplus World War II temporary buildings served as the original cabins for the camp. In 1956, Paul Kent and the General Paving Company loaned the center money to construct a dining, cooking, and meeting structure. All the center building were reasonably well maintained until 1965, but then the combination of deteriorating buildings and increasingly strict building and sanitary codes made the facility useless for all but a few limited uses. 

The center’s Board of Directors had begun a conversation about the proposed winterized building at the May 9, 1960 Annual Meeting. They developed six questions for the Board members to take to their organizations:

1. Are we ready to move ahead with the development of the camp with a winterized facility?
2. What does your Foundation [the religious and community group members of the Camp Howard Corporation] see as the type of facility which it could use for retreat during the winter months?
3. How will your Foundation use the camp during the next five years?
4. [A long paragraph addressing water, cooking, toilets, meetings, sleeping, and heating.] Heating, by the way, was provided by burning coal.
5. How does your Foundation suggest that the money be obtained for such expansion for development which you propose? You should bear in mind that the present indebtedness of our facility is approximately $4,000.
6. Do you favor the employing of a year around caretaker who would be near at hand to generally supervise the use of the camp which the development is such that it can be used during the winter time?

The next information that shows up in our records about Camp Howard appears in 1972 when a pamphlet describing the history, present plans, costs and funding, building design, and a plot plan served as a fundraising tool for the winterized building that was not yet built. The plans described in the brochure laid out a two-story, triangular building – specifically, a 55-foot equilateral triangle “set back into the bank of the [Sangamon] River so that each level may be entered from near ground level.” 

Our minister, Rev. Ed Harris, was one of the members of the Camp Howard Board, representing the Channing-Murray Foundation. On October 17, 1973, he wrote to the Camp’s Board with his concerns about both the site and design of the proposed building. Rev. Harris was extraordinarily talented at soft-peddling hard news. This letter is a master-class in helping the Board reconsider its plans. As an example, Rev. Harris informs the Board that, “Certainly within our little group discussion of the proposed building and use of the site has set off a more extensive and detailed discussion and controversy than I ever envisioned.” 

With his letter to the Board, Rev. Harris  enclosed a copy of a two-page letter from the University’s head of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Dr. Robert B. Riley. Dr. Riley was not, apparently, a subscriber to the soft-power school of setting things right. He says, “I don’t think this is a good-looking building but my major criticisms are functional.” He uses terms like, “spaces have been crammed into it;” “the kitchen is about right for one person preparing TV dinners for a family of four;” “completely inadequate;” “unworkable;” [putting this building on the bank of the river is] “going to cause an unworkable and unsightly mess;” and [the location of the parking lot] “is absurd.”

That’s the last communication we have in our records of the Camp Howard Retreat Center. In 1981, the property was sold to the Champaign County Forest Preserve District for $35,000. The Camp Howard Corporation was dissolved in 1991 for failing to file the annual report required under the General Not for Profit Corporation Act.