On October 2, Ranger Arrye Rosser of Cuyahoga Valley National Park and CPHDH director Mark Souther met with Sheila Thompson at Camp Mueller, where they conducted an oral history interview about her camp experiences in the summers from 1960 to 1966. The interview, which emerged from Rosser and Souther’s collaborative work on the Green Book Cleveland project, joins others collected since 2010 in the Camp Mueller collection on CPHDH’s Cleveland Voices website.
Established by the Phillis Wheatley Association of Cleveland in 1941 on hilly wooded land along Akron-Peninsula Road just south of Peninsula, Ohio, Camp Mueller was one of the oldest Black-owned and operated camps in the United States. In 2016, the Phillis Wheatley Association obtained a National Park Service preservation easement for Camp Mueller and sold the campground land in 2022, after which it reopened as Valley Overlook at Camp Mueller, a privately owned campground offering modern furnished cabin and tent rentals.
Sheila Thompson shared many stories about Camp Mueller activities and even old camp songs. She also discussed memories of other camps such as Hiram House Camp and occasional family trips to Midway Lake, a Black-owned recreational area in Orwell Township (Ashtabula County) that was patterned after the famed Black resort community of Idlewild, Michigan. Following the interview, Thompson, Rosser, and Souther took a tour of the campground, including surviving original camp structures, hiking trails, and scenic overlooks on the property.
The Camp Mueller oral history collection originated in 2010 at a time when CPHDH co-founders Mark Tebeau and Mark Souther were working closely with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park as part of a series of U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History grants that engaged K-12 teachers throughout Northeast Ohio in place-based history. The collection is one of 57 in the Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection that is presented on Cleveland Voices.
In recent years, CPHDH has been actively pursuing the transcription of the entire collection, now numbering close to 1,400 interviews. Assisted by advanced AI and voice-recognition technologies, the process of transcription has become far less labor-intensive but still demands the content awareness, contextual understanding, and research skills that students develop in CSU’s History and Digital Humanities degree programs. To date, we have published transcripts for nearly 60 percent of the collection, including all of the Camp Mueller interviews. Every oral history conducted since 2019 has been transcribed immediately.
Want to support our continuing transcription campaign? Learn more about how you can sponsor an interview or a collection on Cleveland Voices.
