Can You Visit Camp Moosehead? Where the 'Baby-Sitters Club' Is Set
Updated July 6 2020, 2:24 p.m. ET
Any 90s kid will remember The Baby-Sitters Club series. Written by Ann M. Martin, Baby-Sitters Club follows five friends (Claudia, Mary Anne, Dawn, Kristy, and Stacy) as they dominate their local town's babysitting business.
The childhood favorite was recently adapted for Netflix, bringing to life the books we loved as kids, but how real can one show make a fictional world appear?
There are certain landmarks to the series, including the girls' hometown of Stoneybrook and their summer camp, Camp Moosehead, that have to be just right to be believable. So how did the show's creators recreate the setting of the Baby-Sitters Club?
Where is Camp Moosehead located?
Like most shows, The Baby-Sitters Club wasn't actually filmed in the exact settings the books took place in — but the towns and cities referenced in the series are based loosely on real places around the United States.
Camp Moosehead, where the girls get together for the summer, is actually based on a real lake in Maine. Moosehead Lake is located in Greenville, Maine. While there isn't a full summer camp to go to near the lake where you can pretend you're Claudia realizing she can't wear heels while camping or Mary Anne putting on the camp's summer production, there are campgrounds around the lake you can visit.
But despite the fact that Camp Moosehead is based on a real lake, the girls' summer camp wasn't filmed in Maine. Like the rest of the show, the series' Camp Moosewood was created and filmed in Vancouver, Canada.
Where is 'Baby-Sitters Club' set?
Both the series of novels and the television show are set in the fictional town of Stoneybrook, Conn. While Stoneybrook also isn't a real town you can visit, the books' author gave the town a real New England vibe to make it more believable — and that was carried into the show.
Executive producer and director Lucia Aniello told Refinery29 that despite the fact that the show was filmed in Vancouver, they still tried to keep some of the series' "New England realness."
"We shot in Vancouver, and the biggest thing was finding a street that felt like Bradford Court (where most of the main cast lived)," she told the outlet. "We wanted it to have 'New England realness' but also feel like it had a good variety of houses."
She said that since most of the series' main characters lived on the same street, finding a location that had different style houses was important to make the show as accurate to the book as possible. In the series, both Mary Anne and Claudia live in visibly nicer houses than some of their friends, and that needed to be kept to maintain the believability.
But the work didn't stop there. Lucia revealed they even used a map from the books to try to line up the intersections with real streets in Vancouver — so despite filming in Canada, it would be as close to make-believe Stoneybrook as possible.