A lovely bit of troop history

[Cambridgeskip]

At the moment I have a group of 5 scouts working on the "herritage" section of our local knowledge badge. They are looking at the history of our troop, which is pretty extensive going back to 1911. This evening, having found out the various places the troop used to meet they went for a bit of a walking tour. Nice and easy, all within half a mile of our current building.

One of the venues is a picture framing gallery. It's a working workshop but surprisingly, given that we don't think the troop has met there since the 1940s, there are still markings on the walls marking the patrols.

Best of all though is the owner..... talking to him he's clearly a bit of a historian and knew a lot about scouting history. And there's good reason for that. It turns out his father was of the 20 boys on the original 1907 camp at Brownsea Island!

I think the troop will be dining out on that one for a little while to come  Photo of him with the scouts here. Wolf patrol symbol on the wall behind.

[blw2]

wonderful!!!

The units I worked with didn't have nearly such a rich ad long history, but I often wondered about the predecessors to my jobs....how they did things, the kinds of outings they went on, what the scouts have become....  When i was Cub master and cleaning out our scout shelf in the church's storage shed, I came across an old bulletin board with a few ragged photos.  Looked to be part of some table top display sort of thing...wasn't much there....photo of a pinewood derby race, I think some indication that they did a trip to Kennedy Space center, not much else.... but all things we were still doing.  I really wondered things like how many Cub Masters have their been in the pack from it's birth, who were they, and so on....and thought that as I'm struggling through the job trying to figure out how best to make it work, wouldn't it be fun and sit together with all of them over a coffee or beer, and brainstorm.....

Then moving onto the troop, I never really saw much out of the Historian POR....such a shame in a way.

[SSScout]

I am a firm believer in teaching history "on site"  as much as possible.  Book learnin' isn't as important as knowing WHO that person is in the old photograph.  (any family albums out there need labeling?   Once you're gone, no one else will know that's Aunt Mahitabel next to the old Buick...)

One of my minor victories:   There is a local restaurant, nice place good food, pleasant staff/company,   that has lots of old historic photos on the walls. Garnered from a local museum and families.   There is one that is of Finneyfrock's blacksmith shop. I grew up with my dad dealing with Dudley Finneyfrock, Jr. and this is a photo of Dudley's Great Grandfather standing in front of his barnlike shop, circa 1870.  The coal fired forge inside was a part of Dudley's shop (updated and expanded tho it was) until it was torn down to make way for the intersection expansion in about 1970.  This picture was rather iconic for the area, except no one noticed until I finally pointed out that the negative had been printed BACKWARDS.  And yep, there it was, a sign in the background,  backwards.  We found a correctly printed version in a historic tome, so there was no arguing about it.  Now, it's a conversation piece for the restaurant.  

Our kids are the less for not having the connection with where they came from.  My Scoutson and others often ask me about when Georgia Ave. was only two lanes, instead of the six we have now..... 

Edited March 16, 2018 by SSScout

[blw2]

On 3/16/2018 at 4:17 PM, SSScout said:

Book learnin' isn't as important as knowing WHO that person is in the old photograph.  (any family albums out there need labeling?   Once you're gone, no one else will know that's Aunt Mahitabel next to the old Buick...)

oh so true....but I've come to learn the sad reality is that generally folks who are getting further away from that Aunt in lineage really don't even care that that is her because they've never even heard of her.....It would really only be her grand kids that might care (for the most part)