Camp Chewonki was founded in 1915 on the shores of Lake Champlain by a young educator named Clarence Allen. In 1918 he moved his operation to Wiscasset, Maine, to the southern half of Chewonki Neck, a 400-acre peninsula on Montsweag Bay. Clarence and a committed staff ran the boys camp successfully through both World Wars, the Depression, and into the 1960s.

In 1962 a group of loyal camp alumni formed a nonprofit corporation called the Chewonki Foundation and embarked on a campaign to raise funds to buy the camp. The campaign was successful. Clarence retired in 1965, and in 1966 the foundation hired a young teacher named Tim Ellis, who had grown up at Chewonki, to succeed him. Under Tim’s leadership, Chewonki began experimenting with year-round programs and more extensive wilderness trips. Thus began Chewonki’s transformation into a full-time, year-round educational institution.

Today Chewonki continues to maintain its traditional boys camp. It also offers a broad array of environmental education programs, traveling natural history programs, wilderness trips and workshops for adults, families, and groups, and a residential academic program for high-school juniors called Maine Coast Semester.

For those who know our programs, Chewonki is a recognized leader in what we offer young people and the results we achieve in creating lifetime stewards of the natural world. Chewonki has become synonymous with unpretentious innovation; we are known as an organization of active self-starters who teach with passion and who engage their communities doing great things. Our participants return year after year!