Wyanoke Personal Galleries :: Camp Wyanoke 1913

Kitchen Staff, circa 1913 -- Charles Elder, Jr

Description

CAMP WYANOKE
This picture was taken at Camp Wyanoke around 1913. The two men on the left are Charles Elder (1894 - 1984) at the top and Alfonso "Toby" Elder (1898 - 1974) below. The identities of the four men on the right are unknown.

Charles and Toby were two of four children born to Thomas Jefferson Elder and his wife Lillian in the town of Sandersville in east-central Georgia. T. J. and Lillian Elder were adamant in their belief that education was the key to the advancement of the black society and they established a school where they taught marketable skills such as carpentry, sewing and other domestic disciplines to the Sandersville youth. The town of Sandersville currently honors their early efforts by having named one of their schools "The T. J. Elder Junior High School".

After finishing high school, Charles and Toby attended the black Atlanta University. Apparently Camp Wyanoke contacted the university and offered summer jobs to male students. Charles was hired and took a coastal boat, probably from Savannah, to Boston and rail to New Hampshire. After working there at least one summer, Charles took Toby, who was about fifteen, to New Hampshire with him. Charles, and perhaps Toby too, worked in the camp kitchen. This experience led Charles to a life-long passion for cooking.

It is difficult to imagine the staggering impact that traveling by boat to Boston, and spending summers at Camp Wyanoke in New Hampshire, had on two black boys from rural Georgia in 1913. This experience surely had a profound influence on their later successes.

Charles graduated from Atlanta University with a BA degree and served in the trenches of France as a member of the Army Signal Corps during WW 1. At the end of the war he joined a black insurance company and became responsible for its operations in the states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas. He married Lillian Harrison and had two children.

Toby graduated from Atlanta University and continued his studies to earn a doctorate in education. He also studied briefly at Cambridge University in England. He became dean of North Carolina Central University, and then the head of the School of Education at Atlanta University. He returned to North Carolina Central to serve as its president from 1948 until his retirement in 1963. He married Louise Holmes and had no children.

Could all of this have happened without the Camp Wyanoke experience opening the world to them? It is highly unlikely.

Submitted by Charles Elder Jr. November 7, 2009