I am pleased to announce the publication of a magazine article about local camps entitled “Training America’s Youth in ‘Woodlore, Watersports, and the Mysteries of the Great Outdoors’: Lynchburg-Area Boy Scout Camps in the Twentieth Century” in the Spring 2018 issue of Lynch’s Ferry: A Journal of Local History. While still current, copies are available at local independent booksellers including Givens Books and Bookshop on the Avenue. Issues are also available from Blackwell Press/The Design Group at 311 Rivermont Avenue, Lynchburg, VA 24504 or may be ordered online here.
Excerpt from article (by W. Scott Smith, copyright Lynch’s Ferry: A Journal of Local History):
At the turn of the century, following decades of urbanization and mechanization throughout the United States, Ernest Thompson Seton declared that the “whole nation is turning toward the outdoor life, seeking in it the physical regeneration needed for continued national existence.” While it was an overstatement that the “whole nation” was turning to the outdoors, men like Seton and his peer Daniel Carter Beard strongly believed that more Americans needed exposure to the outdoors as a way of re-centering the country’s soul, and both would work to eventually form the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.