Away to Camp, and the Children's Room

CAMP EBERHART FROM 1909 · THE HARRIS BRANCH FROM 2004

The camps half of this row was untested when the audit ran; it tests to a single great name. The camp of this region, for Granger children as for the county's, is the South Bend YMCA's camp: YMCA Camp Eberhart, on Corey Lake at Three Rivers, Michigan, forty miles from South Bend on the Michigan Central line of its founding era. The South Bend YMCA started the camp in the season of 1909, after Harris Eberhart — a young camper of the South Bend Y — was killed on July 24, 1909, when the car he rode in stalled on railroad tracks at Munster, Indiana; his parents, E. G. Eberhart and his wife, gave $7,500 and thirteen and a half acres in his memory for a permanent camp at Corey Lake, open in its first constitution to boys of northern Indiana aged twelve to sixteen, its clubhouse built of the lake shore's stones and dedicated on the Fourth of July. It was the first YMCA camp in the country to offer a summer programme for young women, and fully co-educational by the 1970s; it stands today on 200 acres with over a mile of Corey Lake shoreline, a branch of the YMCA of Greater Michiana, serving more than 8,200 children and adults a year in its current record. No camp is seated inside the CDP in any record reached — the negative prints with the positive, as this section's form requires — and no church camp carries a Granger-seated record at printable strength in the sources searched; the church camps of the region are their denominations' and counties' whole, pointed to and not absorbed. The Granger child's summer, at documented strength, ran forty miles north to Corey Lake, as it had since before there was a Granger suburb to send children from.

The children's-room half stands where Arts left it, and this row's duty is to print its gap at full size rather than smooth it. The Harris Branch's children's room as a place is documented whole in the library entry there: the 2004 dedication with its scrapbook-making, the 2005 Saturday scrapbooking sessions, the 2006 garden and its reading-fairy statue, and the 2023–27 plan's rebuilt youth areas — teen space enlarged, youth areas remade as flexible programming space. What does not stand is the room's programming course — story times, exhibits, author visits, the week-by-week life of the room across twenty years — and it stands in the build's own register as GAP-ART-7, retained as a NAMED GAP in this row's closure: settler, the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's programme archives and annual reports. A depth addendum does not close a gap by describing the room around it; it prints the settler and moves on, as here.

Sources:

1. YMCA Camp Eberhart, the camp's record — founded / first built 1909; 200 acres; over a mile of Corey Lake shoreline; branch of the YMCA of Greater Michiana; first YMCA camp to offer a summer programme for young women; co-educational by the 1970s.
2. The South Bend YMCA's own camp history, in Michiana Memory (SJCPL) — Camp Eberhart started in the season of 1909 by the Boys' Department of the South Bend YMCA; Harris Eberhart's death, July 24, 1909; the parents' $7,500 and 13½ acres; boys 12–16 of northern Indiana; the July Fourth dedication.
3. YMCA of Greater Michiana, Camp Eberhart ribbon-cutting account (Moody on the Market) — founded 1909; more than 8,200 children and adults served annually.
4. Arts, library article and its note — the Harris Branch dedication, scrapbooking, garden and statue; the 2023–27 plan; GAP-ART-7 with the MPHPL programme archives as settler.
5. Searches: camps at any Granger address in the fragments and open record, November 2026 — none seated inside the CDP found.