Automobile camping came of age in the late teens when several factors combined to make it a growing form of American recreation. Henry Ford started it when he made the automobile affordable to large numbers of people. Aspiring entrepreneurs quickly provided gas stations and roadside repair shops for cross-country adventurers. States rapidly improved highways and roads, and in 1921 the federal government dedicated several million dollars toward a connected system of highways. Family "auto outings" became extended camping expeditions. It was easy and it was affordable. Cities like Denver and Cody, Wyoming, beckoned tourists by establishing auto camps such as the one at Overland Park in Denver. Overland offered baths, laundry facilities, rest rooms, a grocery store, and clubhouse with billiards room—free of charge!

The Brooks Tent and Awning Co. of Denver eagerly jumped into the market for tents and camping equipment. When it opened in 1903, Brooks carried two types of tents, a camp stove, cots, mattresses, and a host of "Horse Goods of Our Own Make." By 1919, when the Brooks catalog combined camping equipment with road maps, it offered fourteen varieties of tents and a host of other camping equipment.

In 1921 Brooks first advertised the square umbrella tent and by 1924, had obtained a design patent, enabling the company to boast that there was "…but one square umbrella tent—The Brooks." It was so easy to put up that "a child can erect or take it down." Brooks did not just promote its goods, however. It enticed travelers to visit Colorado by promoting Colorado’s many mountain parks’ "…many hundreds of miles of good mountain road through cañons and forests, beside clear running streams of pure snow water, where one can travel or camp at leisure."

Brooks Tent and Awning appeared in the Colorado Business Directory from 1903 until 1934, when the Denver Tent & Awning absorbed its rival and began marketing the unique Brooks Umbrella Tent.

BY  MOYA HANSEN, Decorative and Fine Arts Curator
Colorado History Now August 2003