The Blue Spruce Tourist Camp In Milton

The Blue Spruce Tourist Camp, Milton Pa

I know there is a photo of this camp inside the Blue Spruce, I just need to stop in and see it one of these days!

Sitting outside right now, July 2024, is one of the old tourist cabins.  This was being used as a garden shed at a private home, and was recently cleaned up and returned to the Blue Spruce.

For a short time between those two locations, it was parked at my parents house, and I was able to take some photographs.  I can not believe how tiny this is!   It does not appear that it was made smaller - but perhaps?  After reading some of the stories, it's hard to imagine there was enough room in these buildings for all of those going ons.

 

Looking Inside

 

Photos Of The Outside

==========================

MORE ABOUT THE CAMP

In 1925 The Blue Spruce in Milton was a Tourist Camp with cabins for travelers.

The cabins were washed away in the 1936 flood, but they were rebuilt at some point.  The last I found mention of them was in the 1940s. 

"Tourist Camps" were very popular in the 1920s, as the average family now owned an automobile.  It was not uncommon for families to take long driving trips, staying in cottages at tourist camps in towns along the way.

I have not been able to locate any photos of the cabins - but here is what the Bucknell View Inn Tourist Cabins, right down the road  looked like:

(Today this is  Bucknell View Trailer Court)

Harry Wetzel opened the Bucknell View Inn in 1929.   Wetzel also lost all of his cabins in the 1936 flood, and had two feet of water in his home.  

In 1925, Ben McCarty built a "tourist camp" 

South of Milton.

It included small cottages and cabins, flower gardens, and a gas station.

A 1940's Advertisement for the Blue Spruce Tourist Camp

We still see trumpeter swans migrate through here, along with the snow geese

This was in 1940.  

Time Line Of Ownership

1925 Ben McCarty built the Blue Spruce Tourist Camp
1929-1936 Owned by James C. Lenig  
1941 "Well known proprietor of the Blue Spruce Tourist Camp" John W. Rhoades suffered a severe heart attack
1947 - Liquor License granted to Franklin & Martha Showers, for the Tourist Camp At The Blue Spruce


A Scandal In 1935, & A Suicide in 1944

In 1935, two men died in one of the cabins, and their female companions  were unconscious when found, but they did both recover,  in time. And one probably had a lot of explaining to do to her husband, who was not along on this trip.  Both of the men were  married to women who were also not along on this trip. (So at least their children were not left orphans)

The party had purchased "poisoned alcohol" in Shamokin, and when they arrived at the cabins in Milton and drank it, it killed them.  

Bootleg alcohol killed a lot of people in the Shamokin area in the mid 1930s.  On the same day that these two Milton deaths made news, six others died in an unrelated case of alcohol poisoning, with many more hospitalized. 

Amusingly, when asked where they obtained the alcohol, not only did the women claim to have no idea where the men got it, Mrs Jacob Dondoro, wife of a Shamokin businessman, maintained that it was a sandwich she had eaten at the Inn that had made her ill, not alcohol.  (The doctors who treated her strongly disagreed with her on that matter.)

1935 Alcohol poisoning killed two men, women in hospital recovering
Two two couples were found in a double tourist cabin at the Blue Spruce Inn, having checked in under the fictitious names of 
Mr & Mrs William Davis & Mr & Mrs Grant Otto,  all of Shenandoah.
When discovered, the two men were already deceased, and the women were unconscious.

1944 - Pilot Commits Suicide In Blue Spruce Cabin

In 1944, 34 year old Lewis McDonald committed suicide by gas in one of the cabins.

McDonald, from Westminster Md, had been living in Milton, and had a plane kept at the Milton Airport, which he occasionally flew.

He had been living at the Blue Spruce cabin for nearly 4 months at the time of his death, and had lived at a similar establishment in Milton before that.

========================

The Tourist Camps