Oil and tar balls may have ruined some of last summer’s fun at Camp Dixie in Elberta, but Director Marty Miller said the slow season last year will not deter the camp from a fun-filled, jam packed summer this year.

“We have actually cut back just a little this year because we were cut back a bit last year by the oil. We actually did have oil in the water here so we didn’t get to go swimming or canoeing or any of that kind of stuff. We had to alternate things around a little bit. We are not completely sure everyone is going to be coming back so we are just kind of planning for a little bit smaller summer. Hopefully everyone will come back,” said Miller.

Camp Dixie has been around since the early 1950s, but Miller said the camp wasn’t used for summer camps, like it is now, until much later. Five Lutheran Congregations in the area started the camp, which is currently used for summer camps and to host retreats during the off-season.

“During the months of June and July we do a summer camp program here on site where we send flyers out and kids sign up to come and do camp stuff. Summer camp is what I would call it, there is a lot of the typical summer camp stuff, archery and canoeing.

We do camps all summer,” said Miller.

The camp sessions at Camp Dixie typically last for a week, but younger age groups only come to the camp for a weekend. Miller said the location of the camp makes it especially appealing to campers.

“Being on the bay when we can we definitely go swimming and canoeing. We actually swim right in the water. Other activities, obviously we have bible study time every day, we have evening camp fires and then the other camp stuff that you might think of, archery and soccer games, running games. We do have a low ropes challenge course where they can just do some teambuilding things to work together as a cabin group so they can get to know each other,” said Miller.

Miller also said the camp can take up to 80 campers at a time, but how many campers he can take is determined by how many counselors are hired. He said he tries to keep 1 counselor for every ten campers. A few summers ago the camp had 250 campers come through, which Miller said is pretty much at capacity.

Camp Dixie is also home of a traveling vacation bible school program. Miller said the program was started a few years ago to reach kids who they otherwise couldn’t reach.

“Basically we send out five counselors to congregations that want to have us to do a VBS at their site. The cool thing is that we are reaching kids at their home congregations and we are seeing more kids in that program than we see coming here. We have done five congregations in the past couple of years but we could do a couple of more. More and more I think it is hard to get parents to feel comfortable sending their kids someplace. But, if we can actually go to them at their congregation and see the kids there, that has been working really well,” he said. 

When the camp is not bustling with campers, Miller and his volunteers have had to come up with an alternate source of income. Miller and his volunteers sell chicken dinners seven times a year to raise money.

“To keep us going through the rest of the year we kind of rely on retreats and one of our big fund raisers are the chicken dinners we do here at the camp. We do seven of them a year,” Miller said.

The camp’s February chicken dinner was a roaring success, according to Miller.

“This last one had almost 600 people that came. We serve from 11-2 and we served 600 people, which was getting in and get out. It ended up working out really well. It is a little crazy. Volunteers run all that. Lots of people who have done it for a lot of years, some of them going all the way back to the very beginning. Many have been volunteering for 20 plus years,” Miller said.

Miller has been at Camp Dixie for six years. He and his wife moved to the coast from Minnesota.

“I was working at a camp up there and I wanted something different…I put in an application ad two days later I got a phone call from Camp Dixie asking if I was interested in coming down and taking a look. We came down and went, ‘Oh my gosh, there is camp that is right on water like this in such a cool situation.’ I don’t know how I could ever leave here,” he said.

Camp Dixie is the only camp of its kind in the Southeast, and the nearest camp is in Le Grange, Texas.

The next chicken dinner will be March 20 at Camp Dixie in Elberta.