Many of the 650 campers and staffers at Camp Mystic were asleep when, at 1:14 a.m., a flash-flood warning for Kerr County, Texas, with “catastrophic” potential for loss of life was issued by the National Weather Service.

Bubble Inn saw generations of 8-year-olds enter as strangers and emerge as confident young ladies equipped with new skills from the great outdoors and lifelong friends – bonds that would one day prove vital in the face of unfathomable tragedy.

Camp Mystic camper Blakely McCrory, 8, died in the Texas floods on the Fourth of July shortly after her dad and uncle died. Her mom, Lindsey McLeod McCrory, tells PEOPLE about Blakely's 'contagious spirit' and the final letter she received from her.

For decades, Dick and Tweety Eastland presided over Camp Mystic with a kind of magisterial benevolence that alumni well past childhood still describe with awe.

First lady Melania Trump donned a bracelet to honor the “the young souls who now watch over us from heaven” after several girls died in the Texas floods. A flood from last week led to the deaths of at least 129 people as of Saturday night.