ERBC Through the Decades: the 1960s
In the foreground, the Chapel Barn which still stands today; in the background, the first “ranch house” which served as kitchen, dining hall, staff housing, and chapel.
The Fourth of July, 1964 – the first day of Echo Ranch’s first summer camp. The prior three years had been full of preparation for this day, as several new Gospel Missionary Union (today known as Avant Ministries) missionaries and volunteers from around the country worked hard to get Allen McMurchie’s homestead ready to welcome dozens of campers, including building two new barns on the property. Since the road north of Juneau didn’t extend anywhere close to Echo Cove until the early 1970s, ERBC’s first campers (and those of the next seven summers) were brought to camp by boat, all the way from Tee Harbor 24 miles away, in a back-and-forth boat marathon that spanned hours. Over two weeks of camp, one for older kids and one for younger kids, fifty-five campers attended Echo Ranch that first summer.
What was summer camp like in 1964? Meals were all cooked and eaten in Allen McMurchie’s original little log cabin – Echo Ranch’s first “dining hall.” It was a tight squeeze to fit everyone in; with no room to scoot around anybody, the first ones in were always the last ones out! Campers washed their own dishes after every meal in a lean-to constructed outside the cabin, using water heated over fire. And even back then, the food was reportedly a highlight of the week of camp, with breads and cakes baked from scratch.
With no buildings onsite beyond McMurchie’s cabin and two barns, can you guess where the first campers slept? The hayloft of the barn closer to the “dining hall served as the girls’ “cabin,” while the barn further away housed the boys. (The latter barn is the same barn that now has a renovated downstairs and serves as the boys’ dorm for our summer staff... so that’s one way in which not much has changed over 60 years.)
A couple of “action shots” from the inside of the old kitchen.
Those first campers enjoyed creating their own games in the relatively undeveloped campground, but they also had a newly created volleyball court, tetherball pole, and baseball diamond that provided hours of fun. You might be wondering, did they ride horses even back then? Well, Allen McMurchie did have a few horses on the property, but they weren’t very kid-friendly and thus not yet a main attraction for campers. In fact, did you know that the “ranch” in Echo Ranch’s name didn’t originally refer to horses, but to cattle? McMurchie had been raising cattle on the land since the 1940s, and they were still around in those early camp years, meaning it truly was an Echo Ranch.
Cattle were raised at Echo Ranch until the late 1960s. Do you recognize this barn? The door to the hayloft would soon become the door to the Hoffman Chapel.
The accommodations at camp were meager by modern comparisons, but those original campers loved it. When they were told of the plans to build new cabins and other buildings for the coming years of camp, they were practically appalled that the staff thought anything should change. But new buildings did come within just a few years, the biggest of which met several needs: more staff housing, a bigger kitchen and dining hall, and a chapel. By the late 1960s, campers spent every mealtime and chapel time during the day in this new “ranch house,” and their nights in one of the three newly constructed cabins (Eagle, Bear, and Wolf cabins).
As the summers went by, though, more and more people from across the country came to help work at Echo Ranch, and so more staff housing was needed. ERBC’s director throughout the 1960s, Don Callison, came up with the idea in 1969 to move the chapel meeting site somewhere else and use that space for more staff housing. Where to hold chapel, though? Well, the decision had recently been made to discontinue Echo Ranch’s cattle, uh, “ministry,” and so the hayloft of one of the barns was now empty and unused. Don Callison looked at the empty hayloft and recalled how the summer camp he attended growing up, where he got saved, used an old barn for a chapel. And that’s how the upstairs of the Chapel Barn came to serve as Echo Ranch’s chapel meeting area for almost 50 years.
It’s pretty amazing how a building as humble as a cattle barn could become the place where hundreds and hundreds of campers over the decades heard the Gospel, and some came to faith for the first time. But seeing as our God chose a barn as His own birthplace when He came to dwell among us, maybe the story of the Hoffman Chapel Barn is not so surprising after all.