History of RV Campgrounds: Auto Camps, Trailer Parks and the Modern RV Resort
The history of RV campgrounds is really the history of towns deciding what to do with the motorists who kept arriving. A century ago there were no campgrounds at all — just roadsides, farmers' fields and city parks. Today's RV resort, with its pull-through sites, full hookups and clubhouse, descends directly from the free municipal auto camps of the 1920s, through Depression-era trailer parks and the chain era of the 1960s. Tracing that line explains why campgrounds look the way they do — and why finding one is now a discipline of its own.
When you are ready to use the modern system, our guide to how to find RV campgrounds covers booking windows, passes and apps, and the provider directory on RV Frontier lists today's parks and services.
Before campgrounds: the roadside era
In the 1910s, "auto camping" meant exactly that: you drove until dark and camped where you stopped. Motorists pitched tents in pastures, schoolyards and beside the road, often with a farmer's permission and sometimes without. A hard day's drive might cover forty or fifty miles on the roads of the time, and there were no worthwhile highways and few camps of any kind.
Towns quickly saw both opportunity and problem. Travelling motorists spent money, but uncontrolled camping raised complaints about sanitation, noise and fire. The municipal auto camp was the compromise: a town set aside part of a city park or a field at its edge, added water, toilets and fireplaces, and invited motorists to stay — free, or nearly so — on the condition they behaved and moved on.
The municipal auto camp boom, 1920–1927
Through the early 1920s municipal camps spread across America; by the middle of the decade there were more than a thousand of them, and a town without one risked losing the tourist trade to the next town that had. Camps competed. The better ones offered electric light, a community kitchen, showers and a caretaker.
The campers organised, too. In December 1919 a group of about twenty auto campers wintering at De Soto Park in Tampa, Florida — the first public campground in the state — formed the Tin Can Tourists, often described as America's first RV club. Their slogan was "No fees! No dues! No graft!", members soldered a tin can to their radiator cap as a badge, and membership climbed through the 1920s toward 100,000. The club's existence mattered to campgrounds: an organised, self-policing camping public pushed towns to keep camps clean and respectable, and manufacturers later displayed new trailers at the club's conventions.
The free era faded late in the decade. Camps that charged nothing attracted long-stay occupants and abuses that strained town budgets, so many municipalities introduced small nightly fees — commonly 25 or 50 cents — time limits, and registration. The campground had quietly become a business model.
Tourist courts, trailer parks and the Depression
Private enterprise filled the gap. Through the late 1920s and 1930s, roadside entrepreneurs opened tourist camps and courts: first tent sites, then cabins, then the motor courts that evolved into motels. Alongside them grew the trailer park. When the travel trailer boomed in the mid-1930s — and when the Depression pushed some families into trailers as housing rather than holiday equipment — parks began hosting trailers for weeks or months, not nights.
That dual identity, recreation and residence, never left the industry. It also produced friction: post-war America saw trailer parks regulated, zoned and in many towns deliberately pushed to the edges, even as the same parks quietly housed construction workers, retirees and returning servicemen. The respectable holiday campground and the residential trailer park are siblings from this era, and the distinction between them still shapes the modern map.
The public campground: parks built by the CCC
Alongside the town camps and private parks grew a second system: the public campground. When the National Park Service was created in 1916 its early parks already hosted auto campers in rough meadows near the entrances. The transformation came in the 1930s, when Civilian Conservation Corps crews — young men employed on Depression relief work — built much of the park infrastructure Americans still use: entrance roads, loop campgrounds, water systems, wash houses and the rustic stone-and-timber picnic shelters that define the look of a state or national park site. State park systems expanded on the same model in the same decade.
The public campground ran on different economics from the municipal camp it resembled. It charged little or nothing at first, offered scenery instead of services, and assumed campers were self-reliant — an assumption that lasted until trailers with tanks and hookups changed what "camping" required. That split persists in today's market: public parks sell location, private parks sell services, and the two rarely compete head-on. The CCC loops also set the physical template — a gravel spur, a table, a fire ring, a numbered post — that private parks copied when they standardised.
The post-war park and the directory age
After the Second World War, trailer travel professionalised. Parks added the features that define a campground to this day: individual marked sites, water and electric hookups at the site, a central washhouse, and later sewer connections and dump stations. Travellers navigated by printed directories — Woodall's, published since the 1930s, became the standard reference — and by the signage of the road itself.
The trailer park's residential side industrialised into the mobile home park, while the overnight side specialised for a new machine: the self-contained motorhome and trailer of the 1950s and 1960s, which wanted level pads, 30-amp power and room to manoeuvre.
KOA and the chain era
The modern chain campground begins in 1962 on the bank of the Yellowstone River in Billings, Montana. Local businessman Dave Drum, watching travellers stream past on their way to the Seattle World's Fair, opened the Billings Campground on his land: for $1.75 a night a family got a site with a picnic table and fire ring, hot showers, restrooms and a small store. It was a deliberate product — clean, predictable, priced — and it worked immediately.
In 1963 Drum, partner John Wallace and others began franchising the concept as Kampgrounds of America, selling the KOA system of standardised sites, signage and inspection to park owners across North America. By 1972 there were some 600 KOA franchises. Standardisation was the revolution: a traveller could pull off an unfamiliar highway at dusk confident of what a yellow KOA sign promised. Independently owned parks adopted the same grammar — hookups graded by service level, nightly and monthly rates, seasonal opening — whether or not they joined a chain.
Membership networks and the seasonal site
A third strand joined chains and independents in the 1970s: the membership campground. Thousand Trails, founded in 1969 in the Pacific Northwest, pioneered the model — campers bought a membership rather than paying nightly, then stayed across a growing network of preserved parks on a first-come basis. Rivals and affiliates followed, and whatever one thinks of the sales methods of the era, the membership parks normalised two ideas that still structure the market: camping as a pre-paid subscription rather than a nightly purchase, and the park as a repeat-visit community rather than a one-night stop.
The long stay professionalised in parallel. From the 1970s onward, parks across the Sun Belt built their winters around seasonal residents — snowbirds who rented the same site for three to six months — and the seasonal site became a product of its own, with annual leases, park-model trailers installed permanently, and waiting lists at the best-located parks. The campground was no longer necessarily somewhere you travelled through; for a growing share of its customers, it was somewhere you lived part of the year.
The resort era
From the 1980s onward the top of the market split away. Destination RV resorts added resort amenities — pools, clubhouses, activity programmes, landscaped sites with patios — and courted long stays: snowbirds wintering for months, and later the full-time and remote-work travellers covered in our wider history of RVs. At the other end, public campgrounds in national and state parks remained deliberately simple, and their scarcity in peak season created the booking-window culture today's campers plan around.
The newest layer is digital: the campground is now found, reviewed and reserved by app, and dynamic pricing has replaced the hand-painted rate board. But the fundamentals were set by 1930 — a defined site, water and sanitation, a fee, a time limit, and a host answerable for standards. Every park listed when you browse RV parks and services or search for a stay alongside RVs for sale on RV Frontier operates inside a system invented, piece by piece, over the last hundred years.