The Boy Scouts of America ~ Looking Good at 100

Carrol Walker's Old Norfolk

By Peggy Haile McPhillips
Norfolk City Historian

February 8 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Boy Scouts of America, three years after Lord Robert Baden- Powell held the world’s first Scouting encampment in England.

Chicago publisher William D. Boyce is credited with organizing the first BSA, located in the District of Columbia. Although the movement was not chartered by Congress until June 1916, other localities followed Boyce’s lead in setting up troops of their own.

The Norfolk Council BSA was organized in September 1911 and was one of the earliest in the nation. In a 1951 letter to the editor of the Ledger-Dispatch newspaper, Charles M. Watson recalled the early days of Troop #1 in Norfolk:

“The Scout movement [in England] was only months old. To get a Boy Scout manual, I had to send to London.
That book, with a letter from Lord Baden-Powell, was kept by M. H. McArdle, longtime Boy Scout leader and executive, as a prized possession of Troop No. 1. The troop was formed after being in training on the government reservation at Ocean View. There were 12 boys in the troop.”

The Cub Scout program was adopted by Norfolk Council in 1934 as a means to serve more boys through
scouting.

The Council was given the name “Tidewater Council” in 1935 to include Councils in Portsmouth and northeastern North Carolina.

Troop No. 24, organized in April 1917, is the oldest continuously active troop in the Tidewater Council. The troop broke with the scouting tradition of camping that summer, when the boys went to the Eastern Shore
of Virginia to work on potato farms. The usual source of labor, the migrant workers, had moved north, leaving
no one to pick the crop. It was hot work but brought in good revenue for the troop. The scouts also participated in the sale of War Bonds in those early days of the First World War.

Note for the Ladies: After the fairer sex clamored for equal time, Lord Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes Baden-Powell founded the Girl Guides in England later in 1910. This was the predecessor of Girl Scouts of America, established by Juliet Low in March 1912. Girl Scouting came to Norfolk in 1923.