Generations of Campers Mourn a Texas Institution Devastated by Floods

Authorities on Saturday were searching for missing girls following flash flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas Hill Country.

Each summer, the daughters of senators, governors, oil barons and other Texas royalty would pass through the gates of Camp Mystic on the banks of the Guadalupe River in the state’s Hill Country.

Once on the other side, they would leave behind their prominent last names and become Mystic girls, devoted to kindness, self-improvement and fair play while living in a realm with its own traditions and rituals conjured by generations of the same family.

Camp Mystic was devastated on Friday—the Fourth of July—by a flood that washed away as many as 27 of its girls. On Saturday morning, two campers—ages 8 and 9—were confirmed dead. Mystic’s longtime director, Dick Eastland, also was feared perished.

“He never had daughters but he had 400 girls of summer,” Larkin McReynolds, a self-described “lifer” who spent her first summer at Mystic at age 6 and went on to become a counselor and work in its office, said of Eastland. “My nieces knew the same Dick I knew.”

McReynolds, a Houston native who is now a public-health professor at Columbia University, was alerted to the tragedy before dawn on Friday, she said, via a text chain comprised of a half dozen of her lifelong Mystic friends. Soon, generations of Mystic women were springing into action, offering prayers, tears and whatever help they could to their sisters. “The network—it just amazed me when it spread like wildfire,” she said.

A damaged building at Camp Mystic.

Mystic was founded in 1926, but it truly came to life after Agnes Doran Stacy, a Dallas socialite, and her husband, “Pop,” bought it in 1939. Ag, as she was widely known, had a mission to imbue girls with confidence and leadership skills.

For a brief respite during World War II, Mystic served as a rehabilitation center for U.S. soldiers. Otherwise, it was a world created by Ag and then sustained for decades by her grandson, Dick, his wife, Tweety Eastland, and a handful of devoted staffers who stayed for decades.

It is a place of traditions. Mystic girls wear white on Sundays, which is the day fried chicken is served. They sing the same songs their mothers and aunts did. They learn horseback riding—both English and Western styles—and how to write thank-you notes. The summer culminates in a war canoe race on the Guadalupe between the competing Kiowa and Tonkawa tribes. There are also Tweety’s famous cookies and the Mystic motto: “Be ye kind, one to another.”

Even as adults, many Mystic women still wear their camp bracelets, dangling with silver charms that represent their cabin, their “tribe,” and favorite activities.

“You get a feeling when you drive up to the Hill Country and you’d see the Mystic sign, and you’d feel the weight of the world had been lifted off you,” Nicole Nugent Covert, Lady Bird Johnson’s granddaughter, told the Austin American-Statesman in 2010. “There were no worries. I still feel that way. When I drop my daughter off, I’m jealous.”

Other prominent Texans who sent their daughters there include former governors Price Daniel and John Connally, former Secretary of State James Baker and the Basses. Laura Bush spent a summer break during college as a Mystic counselor. Several Texas debutantes list Mystic on their résumés.

Towels and clothing were still hanging outside a Camp Mystic cabin after deadly flooding swept through the area.

In a 2011 profile of the camp, Mimi Swartz, the Texas Monthly writer, called it “a near flawless training ground for archetypal Texas women.”

In a similar vein, D Magazine, in its summer camp guide, pegged Mystic as “a vital social chit for young women on the fast track to UT sororities.”

Mystic is a Christian camp. A timber cross stands atop Chapel Hill, where campers gather on Sunday for a service that includes prayer, reflection and singing.

“It’s a Christian Texas girls camp but it wasn’t shoved down your throat,” said McReynolds, recalling that there were also Catholic and Jewish campers in her day.

Mystic, and its reputation as an oasis of serenity, was rattled in 2011 when some Eastland siblings got into a messy legal battle over the trust that controls the 725-acre parcel where the camp is located.

The camp has previously flooded, including in 1997, when the Guadalupe overran its banks and hundreds of people in the area had to be evacuated from their homes. But it had never proved as dangerous or deadly as it did on Friday.

Like McReynolds, fellow alums were stunned by the news, searching for ways to help and uncertain how Mystic would revive itself.

“I have no makeup on because I’ve been crying it off for the last 12 hours,” Ashley Anderson, a Mystic alum who spent a dozen years at the camp, said in a Facebook video she recorded from her vacation in Paris with her daughter and other girls who had attended the camp. This was, Anderson said, one of the saddest days of her life: “Camp Mystic is really home for a lot of us.”