Camp Mystic, the girls’ summer camp in Texas where 27 young campers and counselors died in flooding in July, plans to reopen next summer, a decision that has shocked and divided the once tight-knit community of Mystic alumni and parents.
The camp’s owners announced their intentions in two emails sent hours apart on Monday, one to the families of the girls who died, and one to a much broader group of past campers and their families, many of whom remain fiercely loyal to the camp’s leadership.
“We are not only rebuilding cabins and trails, but also a place where laughter, friendship and spiritual growth will continue to flourish,” the email to past campers read. “We look forward to welcoming you back inside the green gates.”
Camp owners opened a second site in 2020, near the original location along the Guadalupe River, which is the campus that will reopen next year.
The question of whether the camp should reopen has roiled the Mystic community for weeks. One child, Cile Steward, 8, remains missing. The Texas Legislature has passed new laws to address camp safety, with an emotional push from the families of the children who died in the July 4 floods that devastated the Hill Country of Central Texas. But questions remain about what happened in the early morning hours of the Independence Day catastrophe, and many families have deeply opposed a reopening.
The messages sent on Monday, which included plans to erect a memorial on Mystic grounds in honor of the girls who died there, prompted immediate waves of shock and anger among the families, several parents said on Tuesday. They also said that they had received almost no other communication from the camp in recent months.
“The families of deceased Camp Mystic campers and counselors were not consulted about and did not approve this memorial,” Blake Bonner, the father of Lila Bonner, 9, who died in the flood, said in a statement on behalf of the families.
Cici Steward, the mother of Cile, responded Tuesday with an anguished, blistering statement that declared, “The truth is, Camp Mystic failed our daughters.”
“Recovery teams are still out there, scouring the river, risking and sacrificing so much to find her so we can finally lay her to rest. For their efforts, we are eternally grateful,” she wrote. “Camp Mystic, however, has only added to our grief.”
“For my family, these months have felt like an eternity. For the camp, it seems like nothing more than a brief pause before business as usual,” the statement said. “Camp Mystic is pressing ahead with reopening, even if it means inviting girls to swim in the same river that may potentially still hold my daughter’s body.”
Both camp emails announcing the decision were signed by seven members of the Eastland family, which has owned Camp Mystic since the 1930s. Dick Eastland, 70, the camp’s executive director, died in the flood, the 28th fatality at Mystic that morning. His wife, Tweety, was at the top of the email’s signatories.
The Eastland family said in a statement on Tuesday that they had “received no negative comments from any of the bereaved families regarding plans to build a memorial.”
Mr. Bonner said that he and other parents believe that the camp’s resources should instead be devoted to recovering Cile’s body. The ongoing search for Cile has become a rallying point for the other families, who call themselves “Heaven’s 27.”
Camp Mystic draws many of its campers from a handful of wealthy neighborhoods in Houston, Austin and Dallas, and its alumni form a network whose personal and professional ties last decades after their summers together. Many families, including several whose daughters died at the camp this summer, have sent their daughters there for generations.
In August, many of the “Heaven’s 27” parents came together to devise and press for a package of state camp safety reforms. The legislation requires youth camps in Texas to build new cabins and move existing ones away from dangerous floodplains, among other provisions.
“Camp safety is now law in the great state of Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said at the signing ceremony in Austin, which was attended by dozens of parents.
The Eastland family said publicly that they supported the legislation, and sent letters to legislators affirming their backing, “especially the creation of detection and warning systems that would have saved lives on July 4.” Camp Mystic is a member of the Camping Association for Mutual Progress, a trade association that includes several camps that opposed the changes on the grounds that moving and rebuilding cabins would be prohibitively expensive.
In a letter to Mr. Abbott before he signed the safety legislation into law, 11 counselors who worked at Camp Mystic this summer called the bills’ passage “rushed” and asked that it be “more carefully evaluated and amended before it is fully passed into law.”
“There will be no future for Mystic and its surrounding camps,” the counselors wrote. “We want what is right for these girls that we miss so dearly while preserving the camp that we have always envisioned our babies attending, like our moms before us.”
The Eastland family said in their statement on Tuesday they were not aware of the counselors’ letter before it was sent.
In their email to past campers on Monday, the Eastlands said they were working to implement new safety protocols and make other changes required by the new legislation. They referred to the deadly flooding this summer as a “catastrophic 1,000-year weather event.”
In 2011, the Federal Emergency Management Agency placed much of Camp Mystic within a 100-year flood zone, an area considered to be at high risk of flooding. The Eastlands successfully challenged those designations, which would have limited renovation projects and required flood insurance.
The camp housed its youngest campers in cabins a short walk from the river, which overflowed and merged with a nearby creek overnight on July 4. Though other camps along the Guadalupe River had to evacuate and rescue campers, Camp Mystic was the only sleepaway camp where campers died. The flood killed more than 130 people along the river.
Next year will mark Camp Mystic’s 100th anniversary, a history that includes several other significant flash floods. But before this summer, none had proved deadly on the grounds of Mystic.
Several parents of girls who died said they still had significant questions about what happened overnight at the camp, and why evacuation plans were either nonexistent or failed spectacularly that night.
“We have not been perfect at communicating,” the Eastlands acknowledged in their email to the families of the girls who died. “The distance that has grown between some of us saddens us all.”
The families of the girls who died were particularly taken aback by the news of the memorial dedicated to their daughters, which the camp’s email said would “strive to capture the beauty, kindness and grace they all shared, while focusing on the joy they carried and will always inspire in us all.”
The camp said it would announce its 2026 dates in early October. In the past, Mystic has had a yearslong waiting list to attend, with some families signing their daughters up at birth. Beyond the campus now set to reopen, the Eastlands said they would “continue to evaluate” plans to rebuild on the original site, where the 27 girls died.
Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from San Antonio.