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.
Camp Jabberwocky, the red bus with the loudest cheer in the Edgartown Fourth of July parade: founded in 1953 by Helen Lamb, the oldest sleep-away camp for people with disabilities in the US, tuition-free on Greenwood Avenue in Vineyard Haven. What it is, its 2026 sessions, and how a visitor can be a good neighbour to it.
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, what happens on Greenwood Avenue every summer, and how a guest of the island can be a decent neighbour to it.
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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 counsellor, 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 |
| Counsellors | 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 |
| How to help | Donate, volunteer, attend the August fundraisers |
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; we keep individual campers out of what we publish.
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