Camden took twelve years of dreaming, planning and saving to come into being. It began as a dream my wife and I shared, of a home with enough land to have an orchard, garden and a few animals. In 1990 I was stationed just outside of Toyko, Japan with the United States Navy when they offered me a substanial bonus to re-enlist. I accepted the bonus and my family and I flew home to Washington State in August of that year and used the money as a down payment on 10 acres of land in the hills along the Cascade Mountains of Lewis County in Washington State.

The name Camden comes from the estate of Sir Charles Pratt (1714-1794), of Devonshire, England. While Sir Charles is not, to my knowledge, related to our branch of the family, the fact that he was from Devon, as is my wife, and supported the colonists during the Revolutionary War and since he was in other ways noble in both character and title caused us to decide to revive the name Camden as a Pratt estate.

We knew that because of my military obligations we would not be able to live on Camden for about ten years so when the real estate agent showed us a ten acres property that had recently been logged off we tried to image what it would look like in ten years. It had been replanted in young trees and the price was right. Friends told us that in ten years the trees would be between ten and twenty feet tall. We put a down payment on the property and financed the rest.

The first picture shows our sons, Robert and James, standing on the property not long after we purchased it. The second picture is of Robert that same day. (Click on any of the pictures to see a larger version.)

When my mother died in November of 1993 we decided to scatter her ashes on Camden. So that I could find the spot later I gathered rocks and stacked them on the site. The third picture on this page shows me at that spot in 1996.