America's First Living History Museum of Camping

Twelve Vintage Units, Twelve Decades

At POV’s living history museum of camping, twelve vintage glamping units serve as fully curated decade-by-decade exhibits of American camping history, from a 1920s Prohibition Era tent with original Capone photographs to a 1965 Airstream to a 1972 Holiday Rambler in the Tequila Sunrise palette.

Every Cabin Is an Exhibit

Every cabin carries its own exhibit — Cabins, Cocktails & Crockpots — with historical photographs covering the walls, a decade-specific recipe, and the cocktail families drank that era. And the central exhibit hall, open year-round, houses nearly two hundred photographs and artifacts: two thirty-foot timeline banners, a working 1960s crockpot with its original recipe manual, Twin Lake Lodge photographs from the 1940s of the resort that stood on this exact lake before we did, an Ojibwe birchbark teepee and canoe, a 1961 Time Magazine camping cover, and vintage Wisconsin matchbooks, road maps, and postcards spanning eight decades.

The Central Exhibit Hall — Open Year-Round

In the Wisconsin Northwoods, the cabin on the lake was always called “the camp.” The history of tent and trailer camping and the history of the Wisconsin Northwoods family vacation are not two separate stories. They are the same story. Every guest leaves with a 38-card decade-specific recipe deck — one cocktail and one campfire or crockpot recipe per decade — to make at home. The history doesn’t stay at the resort. It travels.

History is always a matter of point of view. Here, you’re living inside it.