Dead Gamers, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, ca. 1909

A Vintage Photos Theme Park photo for the theme of something beginning with D.

This is a real photo postcard with a divided back, and the type of Azo stamp box (with four corner triangles pointing up) printed on the other side suggests a date between 1907 and 1918. The text on the banner in the photo is "Dead Gamers, Orgd. 1898, Lancaster, Pa." The lettering on the drumhead is "Dead-Gamers, Lancaster, Pa." Both the banner and the drumhead include an illustration of a rooster that's saying, "Hur-ray."

The Dead Gamers' Camping Association was a fraternal group based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This same photo appeared in "The Lancaster That Was" column in the Lancaster Sunday News, October 22, 1978, p. B-2, with the headline, "When the Dead Gamers Were a Lively Bunch of Robust Lads."

The column said, "The club, replete with its band, is seen in [this] photo as it took its departure from the old Reading Railroad Station, at Prince and James Streets, in Aug. 1909 for an encampment at Bedford, Pa." I'm not sure this information is accurate, however, since Heather Truckenmiller's article, The Dead Gamers Camp in Allenwood, Pa., cites sources that place the Dead Campers in Allenwood, Union County, Pa., rather than Bedford, Pa., in August 1909.

"The Dead Gamers," the column explains, "were typical of a number of camping clubs that flourished in this community in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The lads, we are told, were banded together as all-male social organizations . . . to eat, drink, and make merry with joyous song. And when the spirit moved them they took off for extended camping trips into the wilds."

A handwritten note on the other side of this photo identifies one of the men as "Eugene E. Gates, Sr.," and tells the viewer to "look for man with beard, dot on shirt, in centre (back) of [the group in the] photo."

For a better view of the group, see a cropped version of the photo. I also created an enlargement of the image that shows where Eugene E. Gates, Sr., is standing.

For another real photo postcard related to this camping association, see Caught Napping with the Dead Gamers.