I retired from my social worker job with the City of Roanoke just over a year ago. My wife continues to work full time, and I wanted to stay busy so she wouldn’t get the idea I was laying around the house. That was the impetus for formalizing the Roanoke Scouting History Project a year ago. And, also, I wanted to get 30 years of accumulated (i.e. hoarded) scout items out of the basement.
For the first 12 months, I was focused on collections management and outreach. To that end, I started this new blog to extend and support the long-standing Facebook history group. I sought out opportunities to set up scout history displays, such as the district awards dinner and the OA lodge banquet. The biggest display of the year was installed with co-historian Tom Sike’s help at the council camporee.
There has been good response to the displays when I combine old, vintage uniforms with items that are specific to the early Roanoke Council. I’m slowly obtaining early uniforms from this area, but it takes word of mouth. In the year ahead, I’ll be speaking to groups (I’ll be at a DAR luncheon in April) and publishing more unique content on this blog (www. natahwop.org). Hopefully that will help spread awareness.
The collections archive was initially moved into an indoor self-storage unit, but quickly outgrew that. It is now located in two secure rooms at a nearby church. At the same time, a vast collection of digital files resides on a home-based server with cloud back-up. With all this “stuff,” there are weekly tasks to copy and capture items for the archive. A lot of time was spent last year placing artifacts (i.e. mostly scout mugs) on the copy stand in my basement and taking photos for online display. I also scanned several personal collections of scouters’ photographs (Chris Bryant and Don Alison, to name a few), as well as older council-related documents.
At three Tutelo Lodge functions, I set up a scanning and photography workflow and was able to document photos brought in by lodge members. In one example, member Jeff Wright shared some outstanding personal photos of beadwork by Orville Gates. And Steve Isom allowed me to sift through a tub of old paper records from the late Mike Cannaday.
The third big area of activity for me has been research and writing. In October, I visited the courthouse in Franklin County to research and verify the original land records for the old Camp Snow Creek, a segregated camp our council operated in the early 1950s. About this same time, I began to reach out to old-time scouters to start taking oral history notes and to track down old photos in their collections. In December, I went to visit Mr. Archie Richmond, who was one of three men I interviewed for my 2004 report to Council on the history of segregated-era scouting in our area. Archie is 94 years old now! I’m also reaching out to new people who were present when the camps were integrated. My goal is to someday publish my work on segregated scouting as a whole new edition.
Another project I took on was the conservation of a 1920 scrapbook from the Roanoke Boy Scout Council which chronicles the eight local scouts who attended the first World Jamboree of the BSA. This led to the writing of a substantial article using newspaper and diary accounts of the trip. More than 125 snapshots and post card photos were scanned, in addition to many pieces of paper ephemera. The article will appear in the March, 2025, journal of the Historical Society of Western Virginia, with an expanded version of the article here on this website.
At the end of this first full year, I was enrolled with the council as a merit badge counselor for Scouting Heritage and American Heritage badges. Hopefully we can offer some version of this instruction via Zoom to scouts in our region. I’ve also been tapped to chair a new history sub-committee for the council’s reservation program, which should give several of us a chance to grow in new ways. So, stay tuned for more on that.
As year-end reports go, I’m not really sure who I’m trying to assure that things are “on track” and “rolling along nicely.” That will change over the next year, as my goal is to cultivate a board of advisors and incorporate this project as a non-profit. No one is really coming in behind me to take up this work, but maybe, if there was some structure, then the right people would appear. (If you build it, they will come, right?)
To be continued….
Stephen Warren
-sw
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