Black Owned Business

Couple Acquires Historic G&R Campground in Del.

Leonard and Yolanda Young

Couple Acquires Historic G&R Campground in Del.

This Kent County campground brims with Black history

Becoming campground owners was never part of the plan.

Leonard and Yolanda Young were not, by their own account, especially “outdoorsy” people. Neither grew up camping at G & R Campground in Houston (pronounced “House-ton”), Delaware, or any other campground. Leonard is the founder of DelawareBlack.com and the National Black Guide. Yolanda is the founder of Business Babes, an online business that helps women use PLR to build digital products, and the federal procurement consulting firm Walker Young LLC, according to Technical.ly.

As parents of four children, the Newark couple are always looking for ways to establish generational wealth for their family, so they started investing in real estate not long after they married in 2019.

“Right after the pandemic, we bought two mobile home parks in Alabama,” Leonard told Technical.ly. “And you know, we went back and forth, helping start developing them.”

They posted about the progress on social media. That led to someone asking if they were aware that a campground in Kent County was possibly going to be sold by its owner, a man named Norman Dempster, who had run it since he’d purchased it in 1997.

“It’s the oldest Black-owned campground in the US,” Yolanda said. “Prior to that, it was an officers’ club for Black officers [and other Black veterans] coming home from World War I and World War II.”

The Youngs were intrigued. Earlier this year, they took a drive to check it out and started negotiating the purchase right away.

“Once we came down to take a look at it, we were just amazed — 32 acres over 200 sites,” Leonard said.