If it was important to former AFP intern Tess Majors, it’s important to us – and Nature Camp, a co-ed summer camp specializing in natural history and environmental science education, one of the oldest of its kind in the country, founded in 1942, was important to Tess.
Ergo.
The news this week is that the Tess Majors Foundation has pledged to fund 10 full camp scholarships annually for the next five years, intended primarily for prospective campers from the counties of Albemarle, Augusta, Rockbridge and Rockingham and the cities of Buena Vista, Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Lexington, Staunton and Waynesboro.
These scholarships will provide a two-week, overnight camping experience in the George Washington National Forest near Vesuvius, the small community on the border of Augusta County and Rockbridge County that was the birthplace of my grandmother, as coincidence would have it.
“We are immensely humbled by this support and grateful to the Tess Majors Foundation for eliminating financial barriers to a meaningful and transformative camp experience for young people from the region around Nature Camp,” said Philip Coulling, the executive director of Nature Camp, which is an offshoot of a brainstorming session at a 1939 meeting of the executive committee of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs on a tour of points of interest and educational value within the George Washington National Forest.
Helen Worth Gordon, a conservation specialist with the U.S. Forest Service, suggested a nature camp for children as a worthwhile project for the garden clubs, and one of the committee members, Lillian Schilling, a resident of of Afton, brought the idea up at a 1941 state committee meeting in Richmond, setting the stage for the first summer camp in 1942, at Sherando Lake in Augusta County.
I’m a big fan of how the Nature Camp website’s history page describes the genesis of the effort.
“Mrs. Schilling’s vision was truly radical at a time when most Americans knew little about the destructive impact our actions can have on the environment, global warming and acid rain were unknown phenomena, and such terms as ecology and biodiversity had not yet entered the common vernacular,” the page tells us.
To say the least, Nature Camp was Earth Day before Earth Day was a gleam in someone’s eye.
Tess
Tess Majors was an intern with AFP in the spring of 2019, the spring semester of her senior year at St. Anne’s-Belfield in Charlottesville.
I didn’t know it then, but in addition to wanting to try her hand at writing, perhaps at the prodding of her father, novelist and JMU professor Inman Majors, but Tess was also an aspiring, and quite talented, musician, with an album of music to her credit, and another one in the works.
While she was with us in 2019, Tess wrote about the local music scene, with a special focus on opportunities for young musicians.
ICYMI: Articles by Tess Majors (2019)
- Augusta County music scene: What to love, what it lacks
- Accessibility for all: Sarah’s app idea
- Local government matters: Civic engagement at Waynesboro City Council
- The musical melting pot: A look into life at the Music Resource Center
She enrolled at Barnard College in New York City, and at the end of her first semester, on Dec. 11, 2019, she was murdered during a robbery attempt perpetrated by a group of three teenagers.
Her parents, Inman and Christy, established the Tess Majors Foundation in 2024, to support her interests in music education and nature.
The Foundation supports, here locally, the Music Resource Center in Charlottesville, the Augusta County-based Project GROWS and Creative Works Farm/Camp Light, and Nature Camp.
Tess would be in line to celebrate her 25th birthday next month.
By now, you would have heard of her, at least through your kids – because she was going to make waves in the music industry.
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Chris Graham
