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BREWER – There may be other troops of Boy Scouts across the nation with Troop 1 titles, but few if any were chartered months before the Boy Scouts of America became an official organization.
Boy Scout Troop 1 in Brewer can say just that.
The troop, originally called the Brewer Congregational Scouts, was chartered 99 years ago on Oct. 25, 1909, predating the Boy Scouts of America by four months.
“They were registered first with the Boy Scouts of England because there was no Scouts here” in the United States, Hampden resident Wallace “Bud” Jeffrey, a longtime Boy Scout executive who retired in 1985, said last week. “They got their [Scout] badges from England.”
Scouting came to Brewer with Frederick Oliver of England, who was attending Bangor Theological Seminary and who, according to a 1938 Bangor Daily News article, “was a personal friend of Sir Robert Baden-Powell of England, the father of the scouting program.”
Oliver and Baden-Powell were veterans of the Boer War in South Africa.
Oliver headed to the U.S. on a ministry scholarship that required he work at a local church. He chose to be a student pastor at the First Congregational Church in Brewer.
“Recognizing the potential for extending the principles and practices of British scouting to benefit the young men of Brewer, this visionary leader [Oliver] started Troop 1,” a history of Brewer Scouts states.
A foundation meeting was held in the church hall vestry 99 years ago and drew about 20 youngsters. Troop 1 still meets at the church, now occupying an upstairs room.
The constitution and bylaws for the Brewer Congregational Scouts were established at that first meeting along with the mission of the troop: “To help the physical, moral and spiritual development of youth connected with the Congregational church” the minutes from that meeting state.
A code of conduct also was conceived: “Each Scout is expected to act in manner and respect as becomes a gentleman.”
The Brewer group’s original badges and emblems are decorated with “BC Scouts,” for Brewer Congregation, because the English Scout system didn’t use numbers.
Two of the historic red and blue Scout badges are on display at the church as are numerous ribbons and pictures collected over the years. The original badge logo is still used on Scoutmaster T-shirts and on First Class Scout neckerchiefs.
“[Oliver] wrote England and requested a charter and was granted a charter,” Mark Gray, Troop 1 Scoutmaster from 1992 to 1995, said Tuesday.
After Troop 1 was under way, Oliver went on to form Troop 2 and Troop 3 in Bangor with those groups meeting at the YMCA, a 1938 Bangor Daily News story stated.
It’s believed the groups withered when Oliver, who was part of the seminary Class of 1912, returned to England, and World War I began in 1914.
After a couple of active years, “as was the case with many Boy Scout troops, [Brewer Congregational Scouts] lapsed during World War I, but it was rechartered as Troop 1 in 1916,” the group’s history states, “and it continues to hold that distinctive and significant name within the Katahdin Area Council today.”
Although the Brewer Scouts formed before the Boy Scouts of America, it was not the first to be chartered under the fledgling National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, founded on Feb. 8, 1910, and chartered by Congress in 1916.
“It’s the first chartered, but not the longest chartered,” Marshall Smith, Troop 1 Scoutmaster from 1995 to 2001, said last week referring to the four-year break in operations.
The Brewer Congregational Scouts joined the Boy Scouts of America in 1910, according to the 1938 BDN article, but no documentation can be found to support that claim, said Nicole Hanson, wife of current Troop 1 Scoutmaster, Rodney Hanson. She does have copies of the 1916 BSA troop enrollment, which lists 16 Brewer youth members.
‘Be prepared’
Over the years, the Brewer troop has lived up to the Scout motto: “Be prepared.”
During the massive Bangor fire of 1911, which started April 20 of that year and destroyed around 300 buildings, Scouts from the area were dispatched to the city for guard duty, which they shared with the University of Maine ROTC and the National Guard.
Their job was to bar all visitors from the fire-ravaged downtown.
A Brewer Scout stopped the governor of Maine from entering and in doing so thrust Scouting into the limelight.
“Gov. Frederick W. Plaisted and party, coming over from Augusta, were stopped as they tried to enter the fire zone by one of the scouts, who explained to them that he had orders not to let anyone pass without an order from the police department,” the 1938 BDN story states. “Mr. Plaisted then explained that he was the governor and that it would be all right for him and his party to go through. The scout, however, stuck to his instructions, insisting that orders were orders, and it ended with the governor going to the police department for his permit.”
Later that night at a public address in Bangor, Plaisted praised the work of the Scouts and a month later issued the Brewer Congregational Scouts a citation for their unwavering attention to duty, the article states.
The news of their service spread quickly to other areas of the country, according to a May 1911 article in the Trenton, N.J., Evening Times.
“The Bangor patrols of the Boy Scouts and those from nearby towns came in for much praise today for their manly conduct in offering their services to Mayor [Charles W.] Mullen,” it states. “The youngsters were found available for messenger service and caring for frightened women and girls, and they nobly performed the duties assigned to them.”
Brewer Scouts were called to duty by a special whistle signal blown at the former Eastern Fine Paper Co. mill, Gray said.
“There was a different pattern for who were needed,” he said. “There was a different one for the Fire Department and another one for the Scouts.”
Brewer resident George Hayes, who turns 79 next month, joined Troop 1 when he was a youngster and remembers being a Scout messenger during World War II.
“Back in those days, joining the Boy Scouts was something just about everybody did,” he said on Tuesday. “That was also during the second World War and … we also served as air raid runners. When we would have air raid drills, the Scouts in the neighborhood became runners. The Boy Scouts would take the messages in hand and dash off to deliver them.”
He and his fellow Scouts held scrap metal, newspaper and magazine drives “as part of the war effort,” he said. Hayes also was called into action when he posed in his Scout uniform with a P-38 fighter plane and its pilot, Lt. Burton Weil of Pennsylvania, who was part of a squadron that stopped to refuel at Dow Air Force Base in Bangor. The patriotic photo was published in the BDN in July 1942.
The lessons he learned as a Scout have stayed with him throughout his life, Hayes said.
Nowadays, Troop 1 continues to give back to the community, Scoutmaster Rodney Hanson said. This year the group is volunteering to help residents winterize their homes and is planning a rummage sale to raise money to give back to the church, which does not charge them anything to meet there.
Troop 1 now has eight chartered members. Brewer’s other troop, Boy Scout Troop 15, was organized in 1917 and now has 18 members. Around 65 Cub Scouts are enrolled in Brewer Scout youth programs, Hanson said.
Scouts originally were part of the Bangor-Brewer Boy Scout Council, chartered in 1920, which became the Penobscot Council in 1923, then part of the Katahdin Area Council, which formed in 1927.
In 1921 Camp Roosevelt on Little Fitts Pond in Eddington was acquired by the Scouts and has served thousands of summer campers over the years.
100th anniversary plans
No big events are scheduled in Brewer for this anniversary, but planning for the 100th anniversary has begun. Nicole Hanson is collecting memorabilia, photos and stories from former Scouts and their parents and plans to create brochures and displays with the collected items.
“We want to find the people associated with Troop 1 in the last 100 years,” she said. “We’re planning an alumni supper to gather them back together. [And we] are in the process of setting up our committee meeting to plan what is going to happen over the next year.”
Smith added, “There are a lot of people out there that probably have some of the [troop’s] history” in storage.
Troop 1 leaders would like to hold a Camporee in the spring with Troop 15 to bring area Scouts together and to take a trip to Washington, D.C., next summer to meet the new president.
In its beginning Scouting, with its outdoor activities that taught boys first aid, survival skills, teamwork and citizenship, was attractive to boys first in England and then in the United States.
“Boy Scouting became an overnight success, and by the beginning of 1910 – less than three years after its founding – there were more than 200,000 Scouts in Britain,” the Boy Scout stuff.com Web site states.
While Scouts in the Bangor-Brewer area may have jumped on board early in the game, they were not alone. At the turn of the 20th century in the U.S., a number of outdoor-oriented youth organizations had formed. The U.S. Boy Scouts and the Rhode Island Boy Scouts formed shortly after the Boy Scouts of America in 1910, but others that practiced Scouting principles existed all around the country.
Boy Scout Troop 1 in Brewer may not be the first chartered with the Boy Scouts of America, but its long history is a source of pride to all involved with the group.
“It’s neat to be part of the first unit that formed on this side of the puddle,” Gray said.
nricker@bangordailynews.net
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