Paul Douglas Camp (25 October 1849–5 February 1924), lumber manufacturer, was born near Franklin in Southampton County, the son of George Camp, a slaveholding farmer and wheelwright, and his second wife, Sarah Cutchins Camp. He received an abbreviated education at home and in a local school. During the Civil War he helped run an elder sister's farm while her husband served in the Confederate army.

In 1870 P. D. Camp became superintendent of logging for the timber operation of his elder brothers, John Stafford Camp and William Nelson Camp. Seeking to expand into manufacturing, P. D. Camp borrowed money in 1876 to purchase a sawmill at Delaware on the Nottoway River in Southampton County. Two years later he bought another mill in Hertford County, North Carolina. Camp's two mills, operating as P. D. Camp and Company, annually processed 1.5 million board feet of lumber for shipment to Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In 1880 he admitted his brother James Leonidas Camp (1857–1925) to his business as a partner. The new firm of P. D. and J. L. Camp increased mill capacity to 5 million board feet annually. On 22 January 1880 Camp married Ella Virginia Cobb, also of Franklin. They had eleven children, of whom three sons and five daughters lived to adulthood. In addition, the son of Camp's half sister grew up in his household and later acted as bookkeeper for the family firm.

In 1886 P. D. and J. L. Camp purchased a steam-powered single-circular-saw mill on the Blackwater River near Franklin. Founded in 1855 and then owned by Robert Johnson Neely and William Neely, the mill was the largest in southeastern Virginia. The acquisition allowed the Camps to increase their annual capacity to 12 million board feet of high-grade pine, oak, and cypress lumber. On 21 November 1887 Camp and his brothers incorporated the Camp Manufacturing Company with P. D. Camp as president, J. L. Camp as vice president and general manager, Robert Judson Camp as secretary and treasurer, and Benjamin Franklin Camp, John Stafford Camp, and William Nelson Camp as directors. The Franklin mill, remodeled and modernized in 1891, produced 20 million board feet of lumber the next year. The company purchased the Arringdale plant near Franklin in 1896, a plant at Butterworth in Dinwiddie County in 1902, and large tracts of woodland in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, including 40,000 acres in the Dismal Swamp, about a quarter of the total swampland. To market its wood products the Camp family affiliated in 1903 with a wholesale distributor in New York City. That firm, Wiley, Harker, and Camp Company, allowed the Camps to extend their timber empire still further by acquiring the Angola, Cape Fear, and Carolina Lumber Companies in North Carolina and the Marion County Lumber Company in South Carolina.

Frugal and austere, Camp enjoyed physical labor and had a keen eye for valuable woodland. A contemporary noted that he would buy anything if given five years to pay. His expansive vision and indulgent hand with relatives working in the family's lumber concerns exacerbated the company's difficulties during the nationwide panic of 1907. Facing bankruptcy, Camp and his brothers, according to family tradition, were advised to place their houses in their wives' names to save them from company creditors. P. D. Camp declared, "If I go, I go clean. I wouldn't hold even this pocketknife back," and his brothers immediately concurred. Impressed, a Wilmington banker placed his institution's assets at their disposal. In fact, only by securing loans from five banks, floating a $2.25 million bond, severing its relationship with Wiley, Harker, and Camp, and cutting ties to failing Camp family operations in Florida did the Camp Manufacturing Company manage to weather its financial difficulties. By the time of P. D. Camp's death, however, Camp Manufacturing was the largest lumber company on the East Coast and produced 125 million board feet of lumber annually. The Camp family and its enterprises defined the town of Franklin.

Besides his hands-on direction of the Camp Manufacturing Company, Camp also served as an officer or director of several of his brothers' operations, including the Albion Mining and Manufacturing Company, which produced phosphate, the R. J. and B. F. Camp Lumber Company, and the Franklin Phosphate Company, all in Florida; the Santee Lumber Company, in South Carolina; the Roanoke Railway Company, which began operating in North Carolina in 1910; and the Giles County Lumber Company, in Virginia. In 1897 Camp built The Elms, a comfortable gabled Victorian brick-and-stucco mansion in Franklin, but he also maintained his agricultural roots by operating a sizable dairy farm. A dedicated Baptist, he served on the State Mission Board of the Baptist General Association of Virginia and as the Blackwater Baptist Association's trustee of the Baptist orphanage in Salem. His contributions helped establish the George and Sallie Cutchins Camp Memorial Foundation's chair of Bible in the University of Richmond's Department of Religion. In his will, written on 10 January 1923, Camp left generous sums to the Baptist State Mission Boards of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia and to his local Sycamore Baptist Church to pay for a new building and to underwrite the minister's salary. Many of the bequests had to be delayed, however, because of continuing cash shortages related to business expansion, informal practices that allowed the Camp brothers to borrow freely from their family concern, and a market glut following World War I.

Paul Douglas Camp died of heart disease at Johnston-Willis Hospital in Richmond on 5 February 1924. Nine prominent Baptist ministers conducted his funeral at The Elms, and thirty-three honorary pallbearers accompanied his body to Poplar Springs Cemetery in Franklin. A month later J. L. Camp became president of the company, but he suffered from heart disease and diabetes and died on 4 December 1925. He was in turn succeeded as head of the firm by his namesake son, James Leonidas Camp (1895–1983). Following the creation of Virginia's community college system, two of P. D. Camp's daughters, Ruth Cutchins Camp Campbell McDougall and Willie Antoinette Camp Younts, donated ninety-two acres of their father's farmland as the site for the Paul D. Camp Community College, which opened in Franklin in 1971.

Sources Consulted:
Parke Rouse Jr., The Timber Tycoons: The Camp Families of Virginia and Florida and Their Empire, 1887–1987 (1988), including several portraits, quotation on 112, and will; biographies in National Cyclopædia of American Biography (1891–1984), 37:289–290 (gives variant marriage date of 29 Jan. 1880), and Daniel Decatur Moore et al., eds., Men of the South: A Work for the Newspaper Reference Library (1922), 708, 750; Marriage Register, Southampton Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); State Corporation Commission Charter Books, 6:465–468, 51:123, 62:405, 83:414, Record Group 112, LVA; "Pine Products of the Atlantic Coast," American Lumberman (15 June 1907): 51–67; Death Certificate, Richmond City, BVS; death notice in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7 Feb. 1924; obituaries in Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 6 Feb. 1924, and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 8 Feb. 1924.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sara B. Bearss.

How to cite this page:
Sara B. Bearss,"Paul Douglas Camp (1849–1924)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2001 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Camp_Paul_Douglas, accessed [today's date]).

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