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The red bus in the parade line-up. Camp Jabberwocky has rolled down Main Street on the Fourth for generations, and the applause it gets is the loudest of the morning.
The red bus that gets the loudest cheer in the Edgartown Fourth of July parade belongs to Camp Jabberwocky, a tuition-free summer camp for people with disabilities that has run on the Vineyard since 1953. An islander's account of where it came from and what it is. For anything official, the camp's own site is the source.
Watch the Edgartown Fourth of July parade from anywhere on Main Street and you will notice one float gets a louder cheer than the fire engines: a bright red school bus, hand-painted signs bristling from the windows, and a crowd of campers and counselors in matching shirts waving as if the whole town had turned out for them, which it has. That is Camp Jabberwocky, and the cheer is the island's way of saying something it has said every summer since 1953. This is the short story of the camp, for the visitor who saw the bus and wondered what it is, why it is here and what happens on Greenwood Avenue every summer.
A note before we start. MV Vacation has no connection to Camp Jabberwocky: we have not worked with the camp and we do not speak for it. This is an islander's account, put together from public reporting and the camp's own website, because the bus is one of the first things visitors ask about. For sessions, volunteering or giving, campjabberwocky.org is the only source.
Filmed July 2026
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Helen Lamb was a speech pathologist in Fall River who summered on the Vineyard with her family, and in the early 1950s she noticed that the children with cerebral palsy she worked with never went anywhere in summer. Nobody took them; nowhere would have them. So in 1953 she and her first counselor, a sixteen-year-old named Ursula Dittami, brought sixteen campers to a small cottage called Happy Days in the Oak Bluffs Campground, lent by her sister, and ran a camp. The premise was radical for its decade: that people with disabilities deserved a summer of adventure and friends rather than a summer of limits. The camp outgrew the cottage, and in 1965 Grace Episcopal Church in Vineyard Haven gave it eight acres on Greenwood Avenue, about a mile from Main Street; islanders built the cabins and the central buildings in a single winter, with the plumbing. Helen Lamb, known to everyone as Hellcat, ran the camp for decades, recited Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky to campers into her nineties, and died in 2011 at 96. Her son directed the camp after her and sits on its board at 81; her granddaughter is a co-director today. It is, by most reckonings, the oldest sleep-away camp for people with disabilities in the United States, and it has never charged a camper a dollar.
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| Founded | 1953, by Helen “Hellcat” Lamb, in a Campground cottage in Oak Bluffs |
|---|---|
| Campus | 200 Greenwood Avenue, Vineyard Haven, on land given by Grace Episcopal Church in 1965 |
| Campers | 150 and more a summer, all ages, tuition-free |
| 2026 sessions | June 23 to August 23 in four two-week sessions, then family camp |
| Counselors | More than a hundred volunteers, about one to one |
| Where you will see it | The Fourth of July parade in Edgartown, State Beach, the red buses on every road |
| More information | campjabberwocky.org, the camp’s own site, for sessions, volunteering and giving |
The founding, Happy Days, the 1965 land gift, the campus and the family’s continuing role are from the Martha’s Vineyard Times of September 3, 2026, the Vineyard Gazette’s coverage of the camp, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and the Boston Globe’s 2011 obituary of Helen Lamb. Sessions, the volunteer model, activities and the tuition-free policy are from the camp’s own site for 2026. Show dates and public access change each summer; the camp’s events page is the source. The bus photograph is ours, from the Fourth of July parade; it shows the bus, not the campers. We have no connection to the camp and nothing here was supplied by it.
Camp Jabberwocky’s bus, with campers and counselors waving from the windows. The camp, on Greenwood Avenue in Vineyard Haven, has run every summer since 1953 for people with disabilities, and the Fourth of July crowd cheers it louder than the fire engines.
Helen Lamb, a speech pathologist from Fall River who summered on the island, with her first counselor Ursula Dittami, then sixteen. In 1953 they brought sixteen campers with cerebral palsy to a small cottage in the Oak Bluffs Campground and ran a camp.
This page is an islander’s account from public reporting and the camp’s own website; MV Vacation has no connection to the camp. For sessions, volunteering or giving, campjabberwocky.org is the only source.
Tuition-free, as it has been from the start.
On Greenwood Avenue in Vineyard Haven, a mile up the hill from the harbor.
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