Hugh Douglas Camp (4 April 1903–17 April 1974), lumber and paper manufacturer, was born in the town of Franklin, the son of Caroline Fountain Savage Camp and James Leonidas Camp (1857–1925), vice president and general manager of the Camp Manufacturing Company. His uncle Paul Douglas Camp was founding president of the company. Educated in local public schools, Camp completed his secondary schooling at Woodberry Forest School, attended Wake Forest College in 1921–1922, and spent the academic years 1922–1923 and 1923–1924 at the University of Virginia. More interested initially in textile manufacture than in his family's multistate lumber empire, Camp took classes at the Philadelphia Textile School (later the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science) and worked for the Simmons Company, a manufacturer of synthetic and cotton fabrics, in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. He became a vice president of the company in 1926 and served as general superintendent of its textile mills in Roanoke, Virginia, and in Paterson, New Jersey. On 20 April 1927 Camp married Ada Norris Coleman, of Selma, Alabama. They had one daughter.
In the mid-1930s the Camp Manufacturing Company, then headed by Camp's elder brother James Leonidas Camp Jr. (1895–1983), began exploring ways to increase profitability by expanding into papermaking, using as raw material the pulpwood and other byproducts of its logging and lumber operations. In November 1936 J. L. Camp Jr., Hugh Camp, and officers of the Albemarle Paper Company, of Richmond, and the Chesapeake Corporation, of West Point, agreed to erect a $3.5 million, 200-ton paper mill adjacent to the Camp Manufacturing Company's lumber mill in Franklin. On 11 January 1937 the three companies chartered the Chesapeake-Camp Corporation with J. L. Camp Jr. as president and Hugh Camp as general manager of paper production and assistant secretary-treasurer. Albemarle Paper withdrew from the arrangement in the spring of 1937. With Camp Manufacturing providing nearly 40 percent of the wood residue required for pulping, the new mill began commercial operation in January 1938. Chesapeake-Camp turned a profit almost immediately on production of approximately 150 tons per day of paperboard and kraft paper for bags and wrapping. In 1940 Camp Manufacturing purchased Chesapeake Corporation's shares. The two Camp firms consolidated in October 1944 under the name Chesapeake-Camp Corporation and in July 1945 became the Camp Manufacturing Company, Inc.
Much of the firms' success after 1938 resulted from Hugh Camp's managerial skills. Although he joked that when he joined the company he did not know which was the front end of a paper machine, he understood machinery and appreciated technological innovations. By 1948 Camp had introduced a new type of log barker, the first of its kind in the United States, which efficiently provided pulpwood equaling the annual growth of 50,000 acres of pine timberland. He also created a chemical division to exploit the inevitable byproducts of lumber and paper production, and the company profited from the production and sale of turpentine and tall oil, used in detergent, insecticide, linoleum, and paint. Other end products included garbage and grocery bags, hand towels, kraft and crepe paper, polish, soap, waxed paper, window shades, and even ashtrays, gaskets, flooring, and tabletops. Camp Manufacturing was one of the largest integrated forestry industries in Virginia. In 1949 it had an annual capacity of 50 million board feet of lumber, 100,000 tons of sulfate pulp, and 75,000 tons of kraft paper, and the company owned 230,000 acres of timberland in three states.
Camp became executive vice president in 1954. He needed a large infusion of capital to expand and began seeking a merger. In May 1956 the company announced a merger with Union Bag and Paper Corporation, a New York–based company with $123 million in annual sales in 1955, compared to Camp's $27.6 million. Following approval by Camp stockholders on 12 July 1956, the two companies merged as Union Bag–Camp Paper Corporation (after April 1966 Union Camp Corporation), headquartered first in New York City and after 1969 in Wayne, New Jersey. J. L. Camp Jr. stepped down as president of Camp Manufacturing in March 1956 to become chairman of the board, and Hugh Camp succeeded his brother as president. After the formation of Union Bag–Camp Paper, Hugh Camp moved to New York City as the new company's executive vice president. In 1960 he became chairman of the board.
Under Camp's effective leadership, Union Camp acquired specialized box and bag plants in Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In 1961 the corporation purchased Write Right, a manufacturer of school supplies, and four years later it acquired a manufacturer of corrugated boxes in Barcelona, Spain, the first of a series of container plants that Union Camp built or bought there and in the Canary Islands, Chile, Ireland, and Puerto Rico. When International Paper purchased Union Camp in a $6.6 billion stock transaction in November 1998, the corporation employed 18,300 people and earned $4.5 billion that fiscal year.
Suffering from heart disease, Camp stepped down as chairman of the board in 1972 but remained a director of the corporation until his death. During his residence in Virginia he was a director of First and Merchants National Bank of Richmond and of the Vaughan and Company Bank in Franklin, and while living in New York he served on the board of the First National Bank of New Jersey. Most of the Camps were devout Baptists, but Hugh Camp joined the Episcopal Church, served on his local vestry, and at the time of his death was a member of Saint James Episcopal Church in New York City. He continued the family tradition of philanthropy by serving as a director of the Camp Foundation, established in 1942 to fund education, health care, libraries, and recreational facilities in Franklin and Southampton County. He indulged his love of engines, obtained a private pilot's license, and became a competitive yachtsman. Hugh Douglas Camp died at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City on 17 April 1974 and was buried in Poplar Springs Cemetery in Franklin.
Sources Consulted:
Parke Rouse Jr., The Timber Tycoons: The Camp Families of Virginia and Florida and Their Empire, 1887–1987 (1988), portraits; Rogers Dey Whichard, ed., The History of Lower Tidewater Virginia (1959), 3:405–406; State Corporation Commission Charter Books, 184:192, 290:500, 425:572, Record Group 112, Library of Virginia; Camp Manufacturing Company, Sixty Years of Progress (1948); "Camp: A Continuing Family Industry," Virginia Forests 4 (May/June 1949): 6–7, 13; Moody's Industrial Manual, 1956; Alonzo Thomas Dill, Chesapeake, Pioneer Papermaker: A History of the Company and Its Communities (1968; repr. 1987), 141–146; W. Craig McClelland, Union Camp Corporation: A Legacy of Leadership (1995), esp. 19–20; obituaries in New York Times, Richmond News Leader, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, all 18 Apr. 1974, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 19 Apr. 1974, and Virginia Forests 29 (spring/summer 1974): 28 (portrait).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sara B. Bearss.
How to cite this page:
Sara B. Bearss,"Hugh Douglas Camp (1903–1974)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Camp_Hugh_Douglas, accessed [today's date]).
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