From the Yellowstone's Banks to the Nation's Highways:

The Billings Origins of Kampgrounds of America

Introduction

Few enterprises born in Montana have touched as many American lives as Kampgrounds of America, Inc., known to millions of travelers simply as KOA. What began in 1962 as a modest campsite along the Yellowstone River in Billings grew, within a decade, into the largest network of privately owned campgrounds in North America. The company's history is not merely a business success story; it is a case study in how postwar American mobility, shifting leisure habits, and a distinctly Montanan entrepreneurial pragmatism converged to create an institution that still bears the state's name in its corporate address, even as its yellow, tepee-shaped logo became one of the most recognized symbols along the American highway.

A Feedlot Investor's Unplanned Opportunity

The origins of KOA trace not to a grand vision of a national campground empire but to a real estate decision that went awry. Dave Drum, a Billings businessman who had already built two large cattle feedlots in the region during the 1950s, had acquired land along the Yellowstone River north of downtown Billings, anticipating that the property would be needed for the construction of Interstate 90. When a local farmer cut off irrigation to one of his parcels, Drum found himself holding land earmarked for a feedlot that no longer suited that purpose. The interstate, when it came, was routed farther north than expected, and the state showed no interest in purchasing his riverside acreage. Rather than treat the parcel as a loss, Drum reconsidered its potential.

The catalyst arrived in the summer of 1962, when the Century 21 Exposition, the Seattle World's Fair, drew a flood of automobile travelers across the northern tier of the United States. Billings, then served by U.S. Highway 10 rather than the still-unfinished Interstate 90, found itself inundated with fairgoers passing through on their way west. Drum, along with local businessmen John Wallace and two additional partners, recognized that these travelers, along with the families "roughing it" on roadsides and in city parks, needed somewhere better to stay. They opened a modest campground on Drum's riverside property, charging $1.75 per night for a tent site outfitted with a picnic table and fire ring, along with access to a small store, laundry facilities, and hot showers. It was called, simply, the Billings Campground.

Word, Surveys, and a Business Plan

The campground's first season proved more than a curiosity. Reservations exceeded five hundred over that first summer, an unexpectedly strong showing for what had begun as an improvised roadside stop. Recognizing an opportunity, Wallace devised a customer survey, a research instrument covering forty-two questions, and mailed it to the campground's guests the following year. The response rate and the tenor of the feedback surprised the partners, revealing a widespread appetite among American travelers for a dependable, nationwide network of modern, clean campgrounds.

That data became the foundation of a formal business plan. Drum, Wallace, and fellow investor Robert Boorman developed the expansion strategy in 1963, settling on franchising, then a relatively novel business structure, as the most efficient means of rapid, capital-light growth. The venture needed a name. The partners initially favored "Campgrounds of America," but discovered that the word "campground" was too generic to be trademarked. The company turned to Billings artist Karlo Fujiwara, who had designed the business's teepee-shaped logo, and the group settled on substituting a "K" for the "C," yielding the distinctive and legally protectable name Kampgrounds of America. Fujiwara's logo, a simplified teepee rendered in bold yellow, dots, and lines representing an open doorway and rising campfire smoke, would become one of the most recognizable roadside symbols in the country and remained largely unaltered for decades.

Franchising and the Cody Beginning

With a name, a logo, and a franchise model in hand, KOA's founders set about recruiting salesmen to carry the concept beyond Montana. Drum enlisted Don Hammond of Pocatello, Idaho, to organize a sales force targeting territory west of the Mississippi River, a team that reportedly included a particularly effective salesman named Dale McCart, credited with selling seventy-seven of the company's first hundred franchises. The first KOA franchise was sold to a Cody, Wyoming, attorney and opened its gates on June 7, 1964, becoming the template for what would follow. By the close of that first franchising season, seven KOA campgrounds were operating under the new brand.

Growth accelerated quickly. Drum organized the company's first franchise convention in 1964 at the Rimrock Lodge in Billings, bringing together the earliest wave of operators. The following year, an owners' association formed, initially led by Russ Porten of the Miles City KOA, and the company began selling franchises east of the Mississippi River for the first time. To standardize the visual identity of the rapidly multiplying campgrounds, Wallace commissioned a distinctive A-frame office design; the first such structure went up at a plant in Pocatello, and the shape became a recognizable feature of KOA properties nationwide, shipped to new franchisees as part of their initial buy-in.

Understanding that rapid expansion risked diluting quality, the founders imposed baseline standards on every franchisee. Hot showers and sanitary facilities were mandatory regardless of whether a location was a converted existing campground or an entirely new enterprise, a policy that helped the brand build a reputation for consistency even as ownership diversified across hundreds of independent operators. That consistency did not always translate to architectural elegance; the Billings Gazette later observed that ranchers eager to cash in on the franchise boom sometimes erected the trademark A-frame on a patch of cropland along a highway, earning such properties the informal nickname "dirt motel by the highway."

Going Public and Surviving the Energy Crises

By the middle of the 1960s, Drum recognized that the company had outgrown informal management. He hired Darrell Booth, then serving as director of the Billings Chamber of Commerce, to become KOA's general manager in 1966, handing off day-to-day operations to a professional administrator while Drum turned his attention elsewhere. Under Booth, the company pursued standardization and rapid franchise growth through the remainder of the decade.

KOA's next major transition came in 1969, when the company offered shares to the public. The stock began trading on NASDAQ, with roughly 300,000 shares issued by 1972, a year in which the company's franchise count had swelled to approximately six hundred locations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The 1970s, however, tested the young public company severely. The oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979 discouraged the kind of long-distance automobile travel on which KOA's business model depended, and many competing campground chains did not survive the resulting downturn. By the end of the decade, roughly two hundred of KOA's nine hundred franchisees had closed their doors, and it had become clear that new ownership and direction were needed for the company to endure.

That new direction arrived in the person of Oscar Tang, a New York financier who had been accumulating shares in the depressed company. Tang purchased KOA in the aftermath of the 1979 oil crisis, when the stock traded at what he later described as an attractive price, taking the company private and ending its two-decade run as a publicly traded firm. Tang preserved much of the operational philosophy established by Drum and Booth, continuing to emphasize franchise growth while working to build stronger relationships with individual campground owners. Under his ownership, KOA franchisees organized the KOA Kampground Owners Association in the early 1980s, and rather than dictate policy from headquarters, Tang's management sought input from operators in the field. The company also departed from common franchising practice by declining to charge steep up-front fees, instead favoring what the Billings Business Journal termed "sweat equity" from prospective owners.

Recovery, Diversification, and Later Growth

Following its rapid early expansion—growing from 262 franchises in 1970 to around six hundred by 1972—the network braved the energy crises and ultimately rebounded through the 1980s. By 1982, the franchised system reached its historical peak of roughly nine hundred locations, spread across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, and Japan. As American camping habits shifted in subsequent decades, away from tent camping and toward recreational vehicles and more comfortable accommodations, KOA adapted its offerings accordingly, introducing furnished cabins marketed as Kamping Kabins and Kamping Kottages to serve travelers who wanted the outdoor experience without pitching canvas.

International expansion, however, proved less durable than the company's domestic base. Locations established in Japan and Mexico during the 1990s ultimately did not thrive, and the company's footprint consolidated back toward North America. Leadership continued to evolve as well: Art Peterson took over from an ailing Booth in 1979 and guided the company through the lingering effects of the energy crisis before retiring in 2000, after which Jim Rogers assumed the chief executive role and emphasized the growing importance of internet technology to the business. In April 2019, Toby O'Rourke became president and CEO of KOA, the first woman to lead the company in its history.

KOA in Contemporary Montana

Despite decades of national and, at times, international expansion, KOA's corporate identity has remained anchored to Billings. The company's founding is preserved in the historical record through the Kampgrounds of America, Inc. Records held by the Montana Historical Society's Research Library, a collection spanning 1962 to 2017 that includes annual reports, board correspondence, campground directories, and internally compiled corporate histories. As of the early twenty-first century, the company continued to operate from its Montana headquarters even as its network expanded to hundreds of locations across two countries.

More than six decades after Dave Drum first opened a campsite along the Yellowstone, KOA remains family-controlled and is recognized as the world's largest system of privately owned campgrounds. The A-frame silhouette and yellow teepee logo that Karlo Fujiwara sketched in Billings continue to mark exits along interstate highways from coast to coast, a lasting emblem of a business plan drafted from a stack of returned customer surveys and a piece of unwanted feedlot land on the outskirts of a Montana city.

Works Cited

"About KOA." Work at KOA, KOA, https://workatkoa.com/about-koa/. Accessed 3 July 2026.

"Kampgrounds of America, Inc." Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/kampgrounds-america-inc. Accessed 3 July 2026.

"Kampgrounds of America, Inc. Records, 1962-2017." Archives West, Montana Historical Society Research Library, Orbis Cascade Alliance, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv989561. Accessed 3 July 2026.

"KOA History." KOA Pressroom, Kampgrounds of America, Inc., https://www.koapressroom.com/press-kit/koa-history/. Accessed 3 July 2026.

"KOA Timeline: Highlights, 1962 to 2012." Woodall's Campground Magazine, 28 Aug. 2019, https://woodallscm.com/koa-timeline-highlights-1962-to-2012/. Accessed 3 July 2026.

Miller, Jerry. "Part 1: A Look Back at KOA's Early Years." Woodall's Campground Magazine, 28 Aug. 2019, https://woodallscm.com/part-1-a-look-back-at-koas-early-years/. Accessed 3 July 2026.

"KOA's History Started with a Good Idea and a Humble Campground." Billings Gazette, 15 June 2023, https://billingsgazette.com/business/features/koa-s-history-started-with-a-good-idea-and-a/article_67af2f6a-cece-526d-82dc-d51e34799174.html. Accessed 3 July 2026.

"KOA: 50 Years of Family Camping." Family RVing Magazine, 1 Dec. 2012, https://familyrvingmag.com/2012/12/01/koa-50-years-of-family-camping/. Accessed 3 July 2026.