New Frontier

Many educators believe the frontier was the best teacher U. S. youth has ever had. Its lessons: democracy, self-reliance. Since 1925 stocky, Kansas-born Dr. Lloyd Burgess Sharp, executive director of LIFE Camps, has staged a revival of the frontier for city boys and girls. To the three LIFE Camps* (maintained for underprivileged children by contributions from TIME Inc. and readers of its publications), he takes some 250 youngsters each year for a month's free vacation. In groups of six or seven, each group accompanied by two counselors, the children put up tents in the woods, cook their own meals, learn to take care of themselves in Nature's habitat.

Last week Dr. Sharp began to build a fourth LIFE Camp on a real frontier--a pocket of virgin forest only 68 miles from Manhattan. The site: a 1,000-acre tract in the Kittatinny Mountains of northern New Jersey. Part of an estate given to Lord Rutherford by King George III in pre-Revolutionary times, the tract was presented to LIFE Camps by anonymous donors. It abounds in deer, wild fruit and nuts, has a 40-acre lake (Mashi-pacong), is surrounded by 25,000 acres of State parks and forests. With stone and timber on the land, Dr. Sharp is building a village, erecting a year-round girls' camp and a centre where camp leaders will be trained to spread the Sharp camping plan farther afield.

* At Pottersville, N. J.; Matamoras, Pa., and Branchville, Conn.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.