GREENFIELD — Camp Kee-wanee is marking a significant milestone this year.

The all-inclusive day camp at 1 Health Camp Road will celebrate its 100th anniversary with festivities on Saturday, July 27, from 1 to 3 p.m.

Camp Kee-wanee, officially named Greenfield Health Camp, first opened in 1924 when a town nurse, Anna Cook, began a sleep-away camp for sick children to be fed and learn about health. Although it originally operated as a camp with three weeks for girls and three weeks for boys, it is now a day camp that hosts roughly 100 children of either gender and all ability levels.

“Back in the 1920s there were a lot of unhealthy kids and tuberculosis was running rampant, and so this town nurse thought it would be a great idea to help some of the poor families,” Kee-wanee Co-Executive Director Sherry Wood said.

In the 1970s, the camp was staffed by special education directors from across Franklin County who worked to primarily serve children with disabilities. When Wood began working for Camp Kee-wanee in 1987 as a senior counselor, she said the camp kept its roughly 50 special needs campers and 25 neurotypical children separate. Integrating the camp, Wood said, was one of her top priorities when she became its director in 1990.

“I worked with the special ed department, and we were no longer segregated, but we were a full camp with special needs kids and typical kids. We worked that way for many years until No Child Left Behind came out and they pulled all of the special needs kids back into the schools during the summertime,” Wood said.

Left with 40 neurotypical campers, Wood said she began the specialized artist-in-training residence program in an effort to rebuild Camp Kee-wanee with a focus on the arts.

“We added music, and a lot of the staff I would hire would be teachers that were teaching during the school year, and so that lent itself to having some of the special needs-type campers come back to us — those that were maybe ADHD or had some behavior issues during the school year — integrated in with lots of typical kids,” Wood said. “We just became a program that focuses on self-esteem and the arts.”

Ron, Wood’s husband, now serves as a co-executive director of the camp after he began working there in 2004. Discussing the camp’s 100-year anniversary, Ron Wood reflected proudly on how much the camp has grown over the years. He said in the last 20 years, the camp has constructed six new buildings and replaced the roofs on its main cabin and pavilion.

Additionally, Camp Kee-wanee took one of the original buildings from 1924 and resurrected it, bringing it up to code. Ron said he’s particularly pleased to see the camp live on through multiple generations. Sherry added that the entirety of this year’s junior counselor staff attended the camp as kids.

“It’s quite an achievement. In this day and age, coming off of COVID and dollars shrinking everywhere, to last this long is a definite achievement. One of the nice things that we see each year at the parent performances is we have multi-generational families here. I think we have three or four, three-generation families, where either grandma or grandpa went, mom or dad went, and now the child is here,” Ron said.

Of those who have made the camp a part of their family’s story is board member Tracy Bartus, who began working at the camp in 1991 as a counselor and described it as “one of the best jobs [she had] ever had.” When Bartus moved back to the area in the early 2000s and was looking for a camp for her son, Jerry Trudeau, she sent him to Camp Kee-wanee, where he now works as a senior counselor.

“It’s an amazing camp,” Bartus said. “It’s like a second family to all the kids that go there and for them to have been in business for 100 years is amazing.”

The July 27 event will feature cake and ice cream, and will be what Sherry Wood described as a day of celebration and reminiscence.

“We really just want people to come out and see the camp and how different it is from perhaps when they first came here — share and reminisce. We’re going to have pictures and scrapbooks available, and a slide show,” she said. “There will be people sharing some memories and history, and we would love as many past campers and past employees, past board members to come and join us.”

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.