Old Meadow Camp Office - Grant Grove Village, Grant Grove Village

This building is the old restroom building at Meadow Camp, the exact year of construction is not known. It is shown on a survey map from 1930, so we can assume it was built prior to then. Originally this building was the Meadow Camp office and registration desk. In 1936 it was remodeled into a bathhouse. A former porch was enclosed to create a shower room and the area with the windows became a small housekeeping office and storage area. New shower facilities were added to Meadow camp in 2009. This building is in bad shape, but hopefully a new use will be found and it will be repaired and allowed to remain.

Note that the architecture of this building is different from that of the surrounding Meadow Camp cabins. The siding is vertical, the building has decorative exterior framing members, the windows are vertical, and take a look at the large log posts with bark on the porch. Altogether this is a very different style of building. Why is it different? My theory: The 1930 survey that shows this building, but does not show any cabins, which tells us the cabins here at that time were tent cabins (the surveyor did not consider the tent cabins to be permanent buildings, the area is noted as"Housekeeping Area" but only shows fully enclosed buildings.) These tent cabins would have low wood sides, maybe 3 or 4 feet high and the entire upper walls and roof are canvas. When building these low tent cabin wood walls, vertical board siding as used on the office building would be impractical as it would require many short boards as well as upper supports. Thus they used horizontal boards for the walls (which can be seen in old photos of the tent cabins.) When the wood walls were later raised to enclose the cabins they just continued using horizontal siding. Thus the cabins now have a horizontal siding rather than vertical siding like the office building. But that is all just my speculation. If you have theories or information on this I would love to hear it.