Marriage, work and family took the Mognet sisters from Somerset County to opposite ends of the commonwealth, but nothing could stop them from coming home to spend a week camping with family and friends at Kooser State Park. 

“It’s my hometown (Somerset), and I love it,” said Ethel (Mognet) Woelfel, 95, of Bethlehem. “This is my summer home.” 

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Woelfel, her two sons, and other Mognet family members returned to Somerset County over the weekend for their 63rd summer of camping in Kooser’s rustic cabins — a tradition that began in 1960 with Woelfel’s sister, Dorothy (Mognet) Christoph. 

At the time, Christoph was a young widow living in Erie, teaching preschool and raising Albert, Peter and Robert, her three young boys. Because she loved the outdoors and was active in Girl Scouting as an adult, Christoph took her sons tent camping in the summer at state parks around Pennsylvania. Their camping gear included two pup tents with no flaps or floors. 

“Dot was really into primitive camping,” Woelfel said.  

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In their youth, the sisters’ parents, Peter and Edna (Werner) Mognet, would take them and their older brother, Robert, to Kooser State Park on a warm summer day for a picnic and to go swimming.  

Her father grew up near Trent, Woelfel said, but he and his wife raised their family on South Edgewood Avenue in Somerset. Peter Mognet owned a commercial laundry and Edna Mognet gave piano lessons. 

But when Dorothy Christoph brought her boys to Kooser State Park in the third summer of their statewide camping adventure, their camping trip turned out much differently than they expected. 

“We pitched our tents and it rained,” Christoph told a Daily American reporter in August of 1999, when the Mognet family was having their 40th annual summer gathering at the state park. 

“The (park ranger) said, ‘We have an extra cabin. Would you like it?’ I haven’t been in a tent since.” 

She and her sons moved their things into the dry cabin, then Christoph called her sister Woelfel and invited her and her husband, Carl, and their young son to come and stay for the week. 

Woelfel didn't hesitate to say yes, she said, even though she lived 240 miles away, had a 3-year-old son and was expecting her second child. So she and son Eric hopped on a bus in Bethlehem for Somerset, to meet up with her sister. Carl joined them at the state park a few days later.  

The women’s brother, Robert, his wife Edna and their family lived in Somerset, so the visit became a time to catch up with family and enjoy one another’s company. 

This started the annual gathering at Kooser, which has expanded over the years to include four generations of the Mognet family.  

It’s also been a time to remember the family members who have passed away over the years, including Dorothy (who died in 2018), Robert and Carl. 

And while time and technology — the addition of electricity and hot water in each of the cabins, for example — has changed the overall camping experience in these 63 years, there’s a simpler reason that brings the Mognet family back to Somerset County each summer. 

“The people, the reminiscing,” Woelfel said. “It’s tradition."

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Woelfel said she met her husband in Somerset, soon after her graduation in 1950 from Pennsylvania State College (now Penn State University). Carl Woelfel was from Philadelphia but was working in Somerset for the Internal Revenue Service. 

“He loved Somerset,” she said, but he had already put in a request to transfer to Bethlehem, to be closer to his family, when he met his wife. 

The couple married on Sept. 23, 1950 and moved to Bethlehem, where their three children, Eric, Judd and Andrea, were born. 

As her children got older, Ethel Woelfel enrolled in graduate school and earned a master’s degree in education from Lehigh University. She taught for 28 years at an elementary school in the Bethlehem area. 

She has traveled in Europe, extensively researched her family history and has written books about several of her Somerset County ancestors. She also enjoys doing crossword and cryptoquote word puzzles, and perhaps most surprisingly for someone her age, she is quite comfortable using modern technology.  

She uses her iPhone to take photos and send text messages, an iPad to browse and post on social media and she wears an Apple Watch. She said she especially enjoys reading posts on the “You know you’re from Somerset County PA when...” Facebook page. 

“I learn something new almost every day of my life,” she said. 

Woelfel is also the first to text her children and relatives to remind them that it’s time to reserve the cabins at Kooser State Park for next summer. 

“She’s on her (cell) phone more than a teenager,” said her son Eric, with a laugh. “She texts constantly.”