Dr. Devitt’s Dream – Part II

Patients at Devitt's Camp enjoy a sleigh ride. (Courtesy of Phoebe Ministries)

ALLENWOOD – Devitt’s Camp, a tuberculosis treatment facility was established in 1912 by Dr. William Devitt.  Bill Devitt is the oldest of Dr. William Devitt’s four grandsons who were all raised “next to the vast woods along White Deer Mountain.” 
Bill, who currently resides in York, shares memories of growing up there during the 1930s and ‘40s.

Floods, Fossils, and Fun
When Bill was 5 years old, his father became superintendent for Devitt’s Camp.  The year was 1936, when major flooding occurred along the Susquehanna River.  One of Bill’s earliest memories was “when the big flood came and cut us off [from civilization] for about two weeks. The creek at Allenwood was so high that groceries for camp had to be delivered by rowboat.”

“Many of the patient’s families came to visit on weekends and hanging out with some of their children gave me some extra playmates as, other than at school, I was pretty isolated.  When I was a child I had only one male playmate, John Wright, the maintenance foreman’s son.  But next door to us lived a doctor with a daughter, Marianne, who was a couple years older.  We had some pet rabbits we took care of together and sent notes back and forth between our houses attached to a string on pulleys.” 

As a boy, Bill caught cicadas when they made their appearance in 1936, but attributes his rural upbringing for his extreme dislike of spiders.  When he was an 8-year-old sleeping in his bed, he opened his eyes to see “a big wood spider straddling my pillow just a couple inches away!” 

“My mother had a favorite story she often told.  As a boy, I was instructed to ‘run like the dickens’ if I ever saw a snake.  One day, when I was about 4 years old, I was found outside with my foot planted firmly on a large blacksnake, hollering, ‘Run like the dickens, run like the dickens!’”

“Sometime in the late 1930s, we kids ran down the hill from camp to an open field halfway to Spring Garden where a small single-engine plane had landed.  We had never seen an airplane up close and it was quite a thrill to walk around it and touch it.”

Bill loved to explore. He collected Indian relics, fossils, minerals, butterflies, moths and other items that he displayed on the ground floor of the old original farmhouse at the camp. Bill and his family searched the culm piles around Shamokin for coal fossils; they found ancient sea fossils from a borrow pit just north of Dewart, and Indian relics were discovered along the Susquehanna River just southeast of Allenwood.

Sled riding in winter was great fun. “You could go nearly a half-mile without stopping – but it was a hard walk back.”  One route that Bill remembers went from the road near his grandfather’s house, down past the camp hospital, and then down the dirt road nearly to Rev. Sunanday’s farm, one of the adventure spots of his early life.

Jobs around Camp
“I used to follow the hospital maintenance men around as a kid and watch all they did,” Bill says. “Eventually I would get to help (or be in the way!) digging ditches, laying pipes, building sheds and house additions, shoveling topsoil onto a truck to put in the multitudes of flowerboxes on the hospital decks, and then planting and watering geraniums all summer.  I eventually worked summers both mowing lawns around the hospital grounds and painting the outside of the women’s building – a two-summer job!”

Bill also remembers watching the kitchen crew at the camp make lye soap for dishwashing. Bills recalls: “On the road to the farm was a potato cellar where I would help shovel stored potatoes into buckets, take them to the camp and then help peel the potatoes in a spinning machine that ground off the skins.  There was also a foot-operated grinding stone to sharpen the kitchen’s knifes as well as the scythe blades used for cutting the saplings on the ‘fire break.’  All around the upper side of the camp was a wide swath where trees had been removed to prevent a forest fire from approaching the camp buildings.  Ashes from the various furnaces were continually dumped to smooth the rocky area, but saplings continued to grow and needed cutting on a continuing basis, which I did to earn pocket money as a teen.   There was also a dump for all the waste and debris out in the woods.  There, we kids got our target practice on the plentiful rats, first with BB guns and later with 22’s.”

Bill’s parents paid tuition for him to attend school in Watsontown. At the end of the day, he would catch a ride with other children in the panel truck that made daily trips into town for groceries.  “We sat on crude wooden benches in the back amid the boxes and bags.  Some days we stopped at the Sheffer ice plant in Dewart to get a load of six or eight 150-pound blocks of ice that tended to move around on the bed of the truck, requiring us to keep them at bay with our feet!” 

In the center of Devitt’s Camp was a movie theater where films were shown twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays. During the early 1940s, just before WWII, Bill began selling candy and gum from a card table set up on the porch of the theater.  During the war, however, supplies of these treats became scarce and it wasn’t until after the war ended that Bill was again able to buy gum and candies in Milton.

WWII Begins
“During wartime, my dad had me join him in the room beside the theater at camp where all the patient’s X-rays were stored.  We methodically opened each large envelope and stripped off the lead foil covering the packing paper the unexposed film had come in and which had been left to put the exposed X-ray film in.  We rolled it up into about a dozen balls each nearly 2-ft diameter and took it to town for lead scrap along with the bales of newspapers, boxes of flattened tin cans, balls of string, piles of lead toothpaste tubes and any scrap iron we could find.  Everything was needed and many people in Watsontown, and elsewhere, lost their cast iron fences to this effort.”

Bill recalls, “During the war, we watched with interest the massive construction at the now off-limits Ordnance Depot.  I used a brass extendable telescope, and after the war was over, we continued to watch as large quantities of stored explosives were piled up and detonated.  Our house windows would always rattle from the blasts even though we were a couple miles away.”

Adventures on the Susquehanna
“During my senior year of high school I had a junked 1938 Chevy in the backyard.  I thought I could make a boat out of the roof, so I cut it off at the lower end of all the door pillars, and then bolted boards into the areas where the glass had been, loaded it on top of our car and drove to the creek south of Allenwood.  We attached a 5-HP outboard motor on the rear and gave it a try.  Well, the push from the motor was too great and the rear end kept going under water, so we sank!  The next time we took it to the Susquehanna, south of Montgomery, but this time we had installed a mast with a sail.  But, with no centerboard, all we could do was be blown with the wind, with no control of the orientation of the boat!”

Bill remembers another time when he and his girlfriend, Donna, took a canoe to the beginning at the creek mouth south of Allenwood, for a cruise down the river to Watsontown.  He says, “Not long after starting, we found there was quite a leak in the canoe which we had to bail. When we quit for awhile, the canoe filled up and sank, but our bodies seemed to buoy it enough to stop the descent a few feet under water. Along the way, someone along the bank began shooting a .22 rifle - we thought maybe at us.  So we quickly rocked the canoe to take on a full load of water until nothing but our heads were above the surface and continued that way down the river to the bridge at Watsontown, stopping at the sandy swimming beach to dump out the water and finish the trip high and dry!  I wonder if anyone had seen those two heads floating down the river!

“Our favorite place to wash cars was at a ford in the creek about one-half mile upstream from Spring Garden, at Red Hill.  Here you could drive across the creek on gravel with less than two feet of water. We parked midstream and used sponges and a bucket to do the job.  The only drawback was the leaches that we had to pull off our legs once we were done.  This was also an unusual place to ‘park’ on a weekend night with a date, with the water swirling beneath the floorboards, as you wouldn’t expect anyone else to walk or drive by!”

Next time, Jack Devitt, the youngest of Dr. William Devitt’s four grandsons, recalls his years growing up at Devitt’s Camp. Born in 1944, Jack lived there with his parents and three older brothers until the camp closed in 1956.

In this photo taken in 1947, sixteen-year old Bill Devitt poses with his brothers, 3-year-old Jack (on his knee), 6-year-old Mike (left) and 14-year-old Bob (behind Jack). The four brothers lived at their grandfather's Devitt's Camp near Allenwood until 1956, when it closed. (Courtesy of the Devitt family)

View of cottage used by patients at Devitt's Camp. (Courtesy of Phoebe Ministries)