The last light goes early on Pine Island. Without electricity, there’s no bluish glow from cabin windows, no late-night scrolling, no hum of chargers. On this small island in Maine’s Belgrade Lakes, darkness arrives as an instruction: look up, listen, go to bed tired.

That simplicity—deliberate, even stubborn—has kept Pine Island Camp in continuous operation since 1902. The camp is for boys ages 9 to 15, caps enrollment at fewer than 100 each summer, and runs without electricity or running water, conditions that are less rustic gimmick than an organizing philosophy. Pine Island also occupies a distinct niche in an industry that often reads, from the outside, like a collection of small businesses: it operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, emphasizing character, independence, and community over scale.

A century on the island

Pine Island’s origin story begins with a conviction that childhood should include real responsibility—and real freedom. According to Pine Island Camp, the camp was founded by Clarence Colby on Pine Island in Great Pond, in the Belgrade Lakes region. Colby’s ideals—independence, cooperation, respect, and a love of nature—are not offered as nostalgia on the camp’s history page; they’re presented as the governing logic for how boys live together when the modern world’s conveniences disappear.

Early leadership shaped the camp’s signature traditions. Pine Island Camp notes that in 1908, Dr. Eugene L. Swan took over and initiated what the camp describes as an “adventurous tripping program,” along with many enduring customs. Later, Swan’s son, Eugene L. Swan, Jr., began directing in 1947 and led until his death in 2000, carrying the same values forward while adding “warmth, humor, and imagination,” as the camp itself recounts.

The through line is continuity: not merely a camp that has existed for more than a century, but one that frames its identity around a lived culture passed down, staff member to camper and back again.

What it feels like to live unplugged

A boy arriving at Pine Island doesn’t just trade school for summer. He trades infrastructure.

Without running water, the basic rhythm of the day changes: hygiene, cooking, and cleanup take time and coordination. Without electricity, the evening becomes communal by default, pushing conversation, quiet games, and reflection into the space where screens might otherwise fill every pause.

Those constraints are meant to do something more ambitious than deliver a quaint “back to nature” aesthetic. The camp describes an environment where boys gain “the freedom to make meaningful choices,” supported by a community “grounded in shared values,” with enough time away from home to feel “both independent and integral to a unique community they help build,” according to Pine Island Camp.

The camp’s size is part of that design. Limiting enrollment to fewer than 100 campers each summer, Pine Island Camp argues, keeps the experience intimate and personal—small enough that every boy has to matter, and that his choices carry weight.

Staffing, too, is presented as cultural continuity rather than simply labor. The camp says its counselors and leaders are “nearly all” former campers, according to Pine Island Camp, a detail that suggests a particular kind of mentorship: adults who once learned the same routines, made the same mistakes, and navigated the same social learning curve.

In a broader national conversation about childhood and attention—how little unstructured outdoor time many kids now get—Pine Island’s approach can read as old-fashioned. But research increasingly frames it as psychologically relevant.

“Children living in greener environments have better moods, higher self-esteem and more resilience,” said Sarah Milligan-Toffler, President & CEO of the Children and Nature Network, in an interview cited by the Washington Post.

The camp’s no-electricity rule also echoes a growing body of work examining how nature exposure can counterbalance heavy screen use. A research digest from the Children & Nature Network highlights a review of studies in Germany finding that adolescents in a 10-day screen-free outdoor adventure program showed compensatory mental-health benefits that offset some negative effects associated with screen overuse. The same digest reports that green space exposure was significantly associated with reduced risk of Internet addiction among adolescents, with feelings of awe toward nature acting as a mediating factor.

Pine Island doesn’t advertise itself as treatment or intervention. But its premise—long days outdoors, community responsibility, and sustained distance from screens—sits squarely in the terrain researchers and clinicians are now exploring.

A small camp in a huge business

Pine Island’s island scale can make it feel like a world apart. Economically, it’s a speck in a vast sector.

A joint study by the University of Michigan’s Economic Growth Institute and the American Camp Association estimates that the youth camp industry contributes about $70 billion annually to the U.S. economy, supporting nearly 1 million workers and generating about $23 billion in labor income. It’s the kind of figure that reorients the idea of “summer camp” from personal memory to national enterprise.

The footprint is wide. Data from IBISWorld counts about 5,719 camp operations in the United States in 2024, spanning nonprofit, for-profit, and public models.

And the market is expected to keep expanding. A forecast from Spherical Insights projects the U.S. recreational and vacation camp market will grow from an estimated $23.63 billion in 2024 to $46.26 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of about 6.30%.

Growth, though, doesn’t mean ease. Running camps—especially those dependent on seasonal staffing and weather, and those maintaining large outdoor facilities—has become a balancing act. Survey data summarized by Recreation Management reports that 52.7% of camps are operated by private nonprofit organizations, and that 88.6% report taking actions to control operating expenses, including raising fees or postponing construction. The same survey notes that many camps continue to prioritize investments tied to the outdoors—waterfronts, trails, courts, aquatic facilities—an emphasis that underscores how central land and water remain to the camp experience.

In that environment, Pine Island’s nonprofit identity isn’t just a legal designation. It’s a statement about what the camp is protecting: a model of boyhood that depends on time, separation, and a certain kind of shared work—hauling water, making decisions, living with the consequences, and learning how to be part of a small society.

The camp’s pitch, as Pine Island Camp tells it, is not that every boy will become a different person overnight. It’s that shy or outgoing, “big or small,” each will be challenged by the “simple joys and varied circumstances of outdoor living,” guided closely by staff who understand the place from the inside.

In a country where the youth camp sector is measured in the tens of billions, Pine Island’s bet is almost contrarian: keep it small, keep it dark at night, and keep the island’s demands intact. If the broader industry is growing and modernizing, this camp’s power may lie in what it refuses to add—trusting that a boy, a shoreline, and a community with no easy distractions can still do the quiet work of growing up.