James Leonidas Camp (7 June 1895–27 February 1983), lumber and paper manufacturer, was born in the town of Franklin, the son of Caroline Fountain Savage Camp and James Leonidas Camp (1857–1925), vice president and general manager of the Camp Manufacturing Company. He attended the Franklin Military Academy and Franklin High School and in 1914 received an A.B. from Wake Forest College. While singing professionally he completed one year of graduate work in voice at Columbia University. Although Camp had hoped to pursue a music career, the death of his elder brother from tuberculosis in January 1913 led him to reconsider that course and return to Franklin, where he began working at one of the Camp Manufacturing Company's lumber plants. The United States' entrance into World War I interrupted his mastering of the family business. As a midshipman in the United States Navy Air Corps in 1918, J. L. Camp Jr. (as he signed his name as an adult) served as an aviation chief rigger. After his return from military service in the Fifth Naval District, he joined Camp Manufacturing's sales department and in 1921 became vice president in charge of sales, in effect fourth vice president of the company.
Camp Manufacturing
Following the death of the company's founding president, Paul Douglas Camp, in February 1924, Camp's father, who had held the controlling interest since 1915, became president of Camp Manufacturing and began to impose greater fiscal regularity on the informally operated family timber concerns. He suffered from diabetes and heart disease, however, and died on 4 December 1925. At the annual organizational meeting on 13 February 1926, Camp succeeded his father as president of Camp Manufacturing, which at that time produced about 124 million board feet of lumber each year, with annual sales approaching $3.5 million.
The company's profits steadily increased until the onset of the Great Depression, when reduced demand for lumber in the construction industry forced deep wage cuts for the 2,000 Camp Manufacturing employees. By 1938 production was reduced to about 50 million board feet of lumber per year. Although its storage facilities were full, the company continued to buy and manufacture lumber throughout the depression in order to provide jobs for local men. Seeking to boost profits and to exploit more fully the family business's large timber resources, Camp expanded the family logging and lumber interests into papermaking. With the Albemarle Paper Company, of Richmond, and the Chesapeake Corporation, of West Point, Camp Manufacturing chartered the Chesapeake-Camp Corporation on 11 January 1937. With Camp as president and his brother Hugh Douglas Camp as general manager of paper production, the new company erected a pulp and paper mill immediately adjoining the Camp lumber mill in Franklin. The new mill began operating early in January 1938, with 255 employees producing paperboard and kraft paper for bags and wrapping. Albemarle Paper had bowed out of the enterprise in the spring of 1937, and, despite the mill's profitability, Chesapeake sold its shares to Camp in 1940. In October 1944 the two Camp firms consolidated, first under the name Chesapeake-Camp Corporation and in July 1945 under the name Camp Manufacturing Company, Inc. By 1949 the company boasted annual capacities of 50 million board feet of lumber, 100,000 tons of sulfate pulp, and 75,000 tons of kraft paper. Its lumber, pulp, paper, and chemical divisions employed 1,050 people with an annual payroll of $3.5 million. Camp Manufacturing owned 230,000 acres of forest reserves in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. In 1951 it added another manufacturing plant to produce white paper.
In March 1956 Camp became chairman of the board, and Hugh Douglas Camp was elected president. For two years the Camp firm had been negotiating a merger with Union Bag and Paper Corporation, of New York, a company with $123 million in annual sales in 1955, compared to Camp's $27.6 million. The merger, announced in May 1956, was approved by stockholders on 12 July of that year, when the two companies merged to form Union Bag–Camp Paper Corporation (after April 1966 Union Camp Corporation), headquartered first in New York City and after 1969 in Wayne, New Jersey. Remaining in Franklin, Camp became vice chairman and then chairman of the board of Union Bag–Camp Paper. After he retired as an active executive in 1960, he chaired the executive committee for another nine years.
Forest Conservation
Camp's expertise and managerial skills won him appointments as director or trustee of the American Forest Products Industries, Inc., the American Paper and Pulp Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Lumber Manufacturers Association. In April 1943 he helped found Virginia Forests, Inc. (later the Virginia Forestry Association), an organization to share forest management techniques and conservation strategies among timberland owners. Camp's commitment to conservation influenced Union Camp to make a series of important land donations in the 1970s: almost 50,000 acres in the Dismal Swamp to the Nature Conservancy in 1973, the 1,700-acre coastal Turtle Island to the South Carolina Wildlife and Marine Resources Department, and the Tower Hill plantation in Sussex County and a 10-acre surrounding site to the National Trust for Historic Preservation as part of the celebration of the nation's bicentennial in 1976.
Philanthropy
A Baptist like most other members of his family and committed to education, Camp was a trustee of the University of Richmond from 1943 to 1969 and sat on its standing committee on scholarships. He became chairman of the board of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges in 1963 and helped raise nearly $1 million during each of his three years in office. Camp also sat on the governing boards of the University of Virginia Graduate School of Business Administration and the Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania. He served as president of the Camp Foundation, started in 1942 to provide funding for educational opportunities, hospitals, libraries, and recreational facilities in the Franklin area, and he established the J. L. Camp Foundation, Inc., in 1946 to support the arts, education, health care, and religious activities in Virginia. Along with other family members, Camp headed the drive that built the Southampton Memorial Hospital in Franklin. He founded a Young Men's Christian Association in Franklin that bears his name, but a dream of building a forestry museum in his hometown remained unfulfilled.
Camp's professional activities and philanthropy won him recognition and numerous awards. In 1955 the Franklin Business and Professional Women's Club named him Franklin's First Citizen, and three years later he received an honorary D.Sc. From the University of Richmond. In 1961 the Virginia State Chamber of Commerce presented Camp with its Distinguished Service Award. Virginia Forests, Inc., chose him as its Man of the Year in Forestry in 1967.
On 21 May 1918 Camp married Mary Frances Clay, a native of Selma, Alabama, who graduated from Westhampton College in Richmond. They had one son. She died on 26 December 1969, and on 27 March 1971 Camp married Alma Williams Truitt. They had no children. James Leonidas Camp suffered from Parkinson's disease late in life and died at his home, Wyndie Crest, in Franklin on 27 February 1983. He was buried in the local Poplar Springs Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Parke Rouse Jr., The Timber Tycoons: The Camp Families of Virginia and Florida and Their Empire, 1887– 1987 (1988), portraits; biographies in Virginia Forests 4 (May/June 1949): 5, Rogers Dey Whichard, ed., The History of Lower Tidewater Virginia (1959), 3:403–404, and National Cyclopædia of American Biography (1960), 1:343–344; "James L. Camp, Jr.: Man of the Year in Forestry," Virginia Forests 23 (spring 1968): 7, 36; several Camp letters in Shelton H. Short Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; State Corporation Commission Charter Books, 184:192, 207:555, 215:534, 643, 246:568, 267:314, 290:500, 620, 316:801, 329:567, 336:173, 425:572, 460:143, 480:73, 660:309, Record Group 112, Library of Virginia; "Camp: A Continuing Family Industry," Virginia Forests 4 (May/June 1949): 6–7, 13; Moody's Industrial Manual, 1956; Commonwealth 30 (1963): 12–13; Alonzo Thomas Dill, Chesapeake, Pioneer Papermaker: A History of the Company and Its Communities (1968; repr. 1987), 141–146; obituaries in Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 28 Feb. 1983, and New York Times, 1 Mar. 1983.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sara B. Bearss.
How to cite this page:
Sara B. Bearss,"James Leonidas Camp (1895–1983)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2001 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Camp_James_Leonidas, accessed [today's date]).
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