She Built This Camper From a Church. 3 Years. One Dying Man Was Waiting to See the Wood.

In the spring of 1964, a small Baptist church in Coshocton County, Ohio, was condemned and given ninety days. Ruth Calloway had been baptized in that building in 1922. She was not going to let the wood rot in a landfill. She pulled the interior lumber herself over eight days and stacked it behind her garage under a canvas tarp. Then she spent the next three years turning it into a handmade travel trailer — an eleven-foot wooden camper built on a steel axle frame, with floor joists and wall panels and a ridgepole all cut from the church's century-old longleaf pine. In July 1967, she hitched it to her 1964 Ford F-100 and drove west on Route 66. She was fifty-one years old, traveling alone, carrying a vehicle made of a building that no longer existed. Her destination was a hospital in East Los Angeles, where the last remaining deacon of Harmony Baptist Church was waiting to see those boards one more time. This is the story of that drive. The breakdowns in Oklahoma, the crosswinds west of Flagstaff, the night camped above Laguna Pueblo under a New Mexico sky. And the morning she parked the trailer broadside to a hospital window — and waited. Old Camper Stories USA tells the stories of the people who built their own roads and drove them on vehicles no factory ever made. If this kind of story is what you come here for, subscribe so you never miss one. Drop a like if Ruth's road stayed with you. And tell us in the comments where you are watching from. #oldcamper #vintagecamper #oldcamperstoriesusa #camperstories #americanroads #woodencamper #route66history