As outdoor dining became more popular in the late 19th century, high demand led to the creation of designated “picnic groves” in urban areas — the very place that early picnic enthusiasts had sought to escape. Furnished with rudimentary tables and benches like those in Chicago’s South Park (1871), the picnic grove was “a tidied up natural landscape … neither a constructed landscape like an urban park nor a developed pleasure ground, although some of these groves had passive structures like pavilions and hearths.” The tables were made from rough-hewn boards that could withstand heavy use, and they were fixed in place, their posts embedded deep in the ground. In lieu of individual chairs, they had long benches without backs. A single table could be used by several groups over the course of a day, and some picnic groves accommodated several parties simultaneously with dense arrangements of tables and benches. The picnic table had by now become less an accessory than a destination. Eventually, this model was emulated outside the city, in tourist destinations like the Mohonk Mountain house on Lake Mohonk, near Poughkeepsie, New York, and in the national parks.
Still, the picnic was always conceived as a one-day affair. More serious outdoor enthusiasts were drawn to the wilds far beyond the city, where they camped for weeks at a time and made their own rustic tables. The Adirondacks experienced its first tourist craze in 1868, after the Reverend H.H. Murray published Adventures in the Wilderness. An 1886 photograph from Camp Colden, near Lake Placid, shows a party of men seated at a table framed by posts planted in the ground. Warren Miller observed, in Camp Craft: Modern Practice and Equipment (1915), that “the necessity of an eating table of some sort has been given much study by veteran outfitters, so important it is in the long run. For the permanent camp the log and plank tables … solve the problem amply and, with a log bench by each side, make for comfortable, happy meals.” Similarly, Hyatt Verrill opined that such tables could be made “very easily by driving forked sticks into the earth and then lashing a rectangular frame to them and which should then be covered by birch and bark. … In place of the bark, rods or withes may be lashed close together, or cords may be stretched across the top and wattled with willow, withes or other materials. Chairs or benches may be constructed in the same manner.” Made from unmilled lumber harvested near the campsite — the same wood used to construct shelters and keep the fire going — these tables were designed for intensive use, presumably for the duration of the party’s stay in the wilderness. On the last day, they could break camp (literally) and throw the table straight into the fire, leaving few traces.