Camp Catawba and Vera Lachmann papers

Camp Catawba, located in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, was once a farm owned by the Hodgkins family who had moved to the area in early 1900s. Lachmann bought the property in sections from 1943 until 1953 and repurposed many of the original structures from the farm for the campers. Focused on a balance of recreation and the arts, the summer camp for boys operated from 1944 until 1970. Lachmann's partner, Tui St. George Tucker, joined the staff of Camp Catawba as a music instructor in 1946. The camp was especially influenced by Lachmann's affinity for the classics and each summer ended with the performance of a play. After Lachman's death in 1985, Tui St. George Tucker moved to Camp Catawba where she composed music. Tui sold the site to the Blue Ridge Parkway before she passed away in 2004.

Vera Lachmann (1904-1985) was born in Berlin, Germany and grew up in a household of German-Jewish heritage. She attended a school for girls directed by Dr. Sigmund Auerbach and began her study of languages, literature, and philology at the Universities of Berlin and Basel in 1923. Lachmann developed an interest in classics and early epics, studying Icelandic Sagas, European literature, and classical civilization. Earning a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1931, Lachmann, due to the bias in Germany against women in higher education and at the behest of fellow educators Paulus and Edith Geheeb, sought training in high school instruction. After the Nazi party took control of Germany in 1933, Lachmann used her teaching certificate to found a school for Jewish and Jewish-Christian parented children expelled from public schools. The school continued for five years until closed by the Nazis in January 1939.

Lachmann left Germany in November 1939 and began teaching in the German Department at Vassar College in New York State. Leaving Vassar in 1941, she took a number of education jobs in the northeast before eventually moving south to found Camp Rena in Black Mountain, with the help of Elisabeth and Clemens Sommer of Chapel Hill. After the camp's first season in the summer of 1943, Lachmann taught at Salem College from 1943-1944 before returning north to teach at Brynn Mawr, Yale, City College of New York, and Brooklyn College. The first summer at Camp Catawba, founded by Lachmann in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, began in 1944 and Lachmann would continue to direct the camp until it closed in 1970. In 1946 Lachmann met composer Tui St. George Tucker who became her lifetime companion and partner. She redevoted herself to her study of the classics during the 1950s and 1960s and visited Greece as well as libraries throughout the United States and Europe. Lachmann composed and published poetry in both German and English and kept diaries of her travels abroad.