BARABOO — Parishioners at St. Joseph Parish in Baraboo helped Fr. Francis Xavier Gray — later Monsignor Gray — buy the land for a Reedsburg youth camp on Shady Lane in the early 1950s.
Not long after, they used dynamite to clear stumps from the athletic field and built cabins from wood they salvaged from crates of ordnance produced at the nearby Badger Army Ammunition Plant just outside of Baraboo.