Keep Sending Us Old Photos

Recently, we started creating #FlashbackFriday posts on our Wakonda social media pages. Initially, the reason for doing this has been to get people excited about celebrating our 100th anniversary of Summer Camp Evangelism in the Wisconsin Conference, next summer in 2027. However, an added bonus has become apparent: many people who are seeing these posts are former staff or campers at one of our summer camps (whether it be Camp Wakonda, Camp Wahdoon, or Camp Silver Lake), and they have held onto pictures from their time at Summer Camp.

Over the past week alone, I've gotten two batches of photos from Camp Silver Lake in the 1950s, and one batch from Camp Wakonda in the 1980s. This is a huge blessing. We do have an archive of photos in the office at Camp Wakonda, but our archive is limited. We've been blessed to be able to supplement that archive, thanks to pictures people like you have been sending in. We've even received donations of old youth camp paraphernalia from previous camps. All of the above are helpful for us as we ain to celebrate the history of our Wisconsin Conference Summer Camps, and we want to continue encouraging you: send us what you have! We may not have seen it yet! Even if you'd like to hang onto your physical photos and memorabilia, we'd love to at least make a photocopy or take a picture of it. Help us as we work toward our quest of accurately representing and enthusiastically celebrating the history of Youth Evangelism in our conference.

One example of something that is very special is this headshot of Elder Dale Ziegele. Elder Z (as he was known) was the Youth and Camp Director in the Wisconsin Conference for decades, and yet we have very few pictures of him in our camp office archives. Even the pictures we do have of him are not very good (him standing on the edge of a group, him squinting into the sun, etc.). This picture came to us recently from Carmen Magray, one of our teachers at the Green Bay Adventist Junior Academy, and these pictures help us fill a gap. In fact: one of the categories of documentation we're seeking out the most right now are photos from Camp Wakonda in the 1980s and 1990s. While we have lots of photos starting in the early 2000s, when Pastor Mike and Juanita Edge began to run the Youth Department, we hardly have anything from the first two decades of Camp Wakonda, during Elder Z's tenure.

So if you have anything that you'd like to share with us as we continue to update our Wakonda Cabin/Youth Museum at Camp Meeting, please feel free to send it our way! You can send any digital files to Pastor Zack at zpayne@wi.adventist.org. Any physical packages, you can send to W8319 County Highway E, Oxford, WI 53952, or you can just bring it with you when you arrive for our upcoming events, like Pathfinder Fair, Work Bee, or Camp Meeting. Thanks again, in advance, for helping us steward the memories that make our Youth Ministries and Summer Camp special to this very day. Here are a select few of our favorite pictures that people have sent recently.