Summer Camp In Yosemite For Hollywood's Elite -- Includes Black Face Images and Indian Costume!
Urban Military Academy Yosemite summer camp photo album, containing 11 black and white photographs of the summer excursion to Yosemite.
Urban Military Academy was an all male school based in Hollywood, California, founded in 1905. At the time, it was the first all male private school in Los Angeles, with its campus in before relocating to Beverly Hills and later to Brentwood. Contemporary records note that it began to conduct summer camps in Yosemite beginning in the summer of 1922.
The photo album images include:
- Campers and staff posed image, including musical instruments
- Campers riding horses in front of the Yosemite Lodge, with lead student bearing the flag of the Urban Military Academy
- Campers and staff on horseback, posing on the valley floor.
- Campers and staff posing in and around the Urban Military School bus in the valley.
- Campers and staff posing in the valley, with Yosemite Falls back drop
- Mealtime image of campers and staff around 2 large outdoor tables
- Image of campers, two of which appear with black face and one dressed as an Indian in the center.
- Campers watching staff perform with musical instruments -- all staff except one with black face.
- Campers and staff watching a boxing match
- 3 young campers in the valley
- An older mounted camper with Urban M[ilitary] A[cademy] logo on blanket behind the saddle.
Urban Military Academy
Urban Military Academy was a boarding and day school in Hollywood, California, for boys between the ages of six and fifteen, founded in 1905 by Mary McDonnell. (on Melrose Avenue at Wilcox; it later moved to 11600 Beverly Blvd.) and at the time it opened "the only private school for boys in the City." Its commandant was Major Harry Lee Black, who in 1928 helped found Black-Foxe Military Institute on Urban's original site. There was another site located on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and a block east of Barrington Avenue in West Los Angeles. This Academy was active into the late 1950s.
Among its well-known students were Jackie Coogan, John Coleman Burroughs, Richard Sherman, Dean Paul Martin, and John Meredyth Lucas.