Hard Labor Creek State Park is a 24-hour passable by way of paved local surface roads non-gated state park. It is the home of two group camps, Camp Rutledge and Camp Daniel Morgan, both centered on the Lake Rutledge. A second lake, Lake Brantley, occupies the northwestern area of the park. This lake was named for a Brantley family killed by
Native Americans in 1813. Both the camps and the lakes were built by the
Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Camp Daniel Morgan was the filming location of five movies,
Summer of My German Soldier (1978),
Little Darlings (1980),
Poison Ivy (1985),
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), and
Fear Street Part 2: 1978 (2021).
Kristy McNichol starred in the first two.
Cynthia Nixon of
Sex and the City fame, who played "Sunshine" in
Little Darlings returned to the nearby town of
Rutledge, Georgia in 2005 to film a part in the
Emmy winning movie
Warm Springs; a part in which she too was nominated for an Emmy award. Hard Labor Creek State Park is the location of
Hard Labor Creek Observatory; a facility of
Georgia State University, Atlanta Georgia. Camp Rutledge was leased for many years by the Atlanta
Jewish Community Center during the 1950s up through 1962 as a site for its summer camp program serving Jewish youth from the Atlanta area as well as the southern United States. Its use by the AJCC was ended with the acquisition and development of Camp Barney Medintz near
Cleveland, Georgia. The Camp Rutledge facilities were featured on season 8 the show
Ghost Hunters which aired in 2012, and in the 2022 film
They/Them. The park was temporarily utilized as an isolation and monitoring site for patients diagnosed with
COVID-19 with no place to self-quarantine. Only two patients stayed at the site, before a new site was opened at the Georgia Public Safety Training Center outside of
Forsyth on March 24. The park was the special event site of the Parks on the Air, W4H "Wicked 4 Halloween," activation on October 31, 2021 by the Athens Radio Club. ==See also==