Charles B. Stover: Maker of Parks

University Settlement pool, with landscaping in background designed by Stover.

The sign above the entry to the garden at University Settlement Camp in Beacon read: "One's Self Must Garden and Gardener Be." The man who made that sign knew something about that avocation... he was Charles B. Stover, former Commissioner of Parks for Manhattan (1910-1914) and the man most responsible for the design and layout of the University Settlement Camp near the foot of Mount Beacon. The Beacon camp was mainly for underprivileged youth of the lower East Side of Manhattan. And Stover proved the perfect steward for this charitable recreational enterprise that entertained nearly a thousand children each summer. First, he loved children and believed their well being rested in outdoor activity. As City Parks Commissioner, he was instrumental in establishing over 30 playgrounds in New York City as well as several parks (Stover is considered the "Father of Seward Park" in New York). Second, the camp at Beacon suited him perfectly. He would live in the "White House" at the camp-- once the summer residence called "Mountain Rest" of one of his earlier heroes, the abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher. But most of all Stover had a free hand in laying out the 51 acres of the camp. He left his mark everywhere about the grounds. He himself was a mason, gardener, and landscape architect. He planted trees, walked the grounds with a divining twig and found the water source for the camp's Olympic-sized swimming pool, and made an everlasting impression on the children he shepherded there. After his death in 1929, the place was simply known as "Camp Stover" in his honor.

Charles B. Stover at University Settlement Camp, 1925. Stover is sitting on a garden wall he built himself at the camp.