First Boy Scout Troop
Burnside, Pulaski County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Before Boy Scouts of America was organized, 1910, a troop of 15 had been formed here, spring of 1908, by Mrs. Myra Greeno Bass. Using the official handbook of English scouting, she guided them hiking and camping, like scouting today. Known as Eagle Troop,… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
Two years before the Boy Scouts of America was chartered, a schoolteacher named Myra Greeno Bass gathered fifteen boys in the Cumberland River town of Burnside, Kentucky, in the spring of 1908 and began leading them on hikes and camping trips. Working from the official handbook of the British scouting movement that Robert Baden-Powell had launched only a year earlier, she taught woodcraft and outdoor skills that would look entirely familiar to a scout today. Her group called itself the Eagle Troop, and it predated the national American organization that would soon sweep up boys across the country.
Why it matters
It marks a grassroots, woman-led beginning for one of America's most enduring youth movements, showing how the scouting idea took root in small-town America even before it had a national name.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, America was in the middle of what we now call the Progressive Era — a restless, hopeful time when reformers believed the right habits, taught early, could shape better citizens. Cities were swelling, factories were humming, and a lot of thoughtful people worried that children, especially boys, were losing touch with the outdoors and the practical skills their grandparents took for granted.
Out of that worry grew a new idea drifting across the Atlantic from Britain. There, Robert Baden-Powell had run an experimental camp in 1907 and, the following year, published a handbook that turned camping, tracking, and self-reliance into a movement for boys. The idea spread fast, and it reached even small American towns well before any national organization existed to carry it.
Burnside sat where the Cumberland River bends through the hills of southern Kentucky — a river town of railroads, timber, and steamboats, close enough to the wider world to catch a new idea and small enough that one determined person could act on it. It is exactly the kind of place where a grassroots movement takes root quietly, years before the history books notice.
People & events
The person who acted was Mrs. Myra Greeno Bass. In the spring of 1908, she gathered fifteen boys and, working from the official handbook of the British scouting movement — a book barely off the presses — began leading them into the woods to hike, camp, and learn the outdoor craft that scouts would still recognize today.
That timing is the remarkable part. The Boy Scouts of America would not be organized until 1910, when the idea was formally brought over and incorporated into a national body. Bass's group was already two years into the work, calling itself the Eagle Troop, before any national charter existed to give it a name or a rulebook.
And it was a woman who led them — at a moment when women could not yet vote and were rarely credited as builders of institutions. She had no organization behind her, no uniform to copy, only a handbook and the conviction that these boys were worth her time. That she is remembered here by name says something about how much that leadership mattered to the town that watched it happen.
Its place in the American story
The story of the Boy Scouts of America is usually told from the top down: a chance encounter in the London fog, a businessman who brought the idea home, a national charter in 1910. What a marker like this one restores is the bottom-up half of the story — the truth that the scouting idea was already taking hold in ordinary American communities before the national movement arrived to unite them.
That pattern is deeply American. Big institutions here often begin as scattered local experiments, tried by people who simply saw a good idea and started, and only later get gathered under a single banner. The Eagle Troop is a small, vivid example of how a movement can be alive in the countryside before it has a headquarters.
It also widens who gets to be part of that founding story. The early years of American scouting are remembered mostly through the men who organized it, yet here the spark was struck by a woman in a Kentucky river town. Youth movements of this era owed a great deal to such women — Juliette Gordon Low would soon found the Girl Scouts in 1912 — and this marker keeps one of their number from being forgotten.
If you visit
Come to Burnside for the setting first. This is Lake Cumberland country now, a landscape of green water, wooded ridges, and quiet coves that draws boaters and anglers all summer — but the marker asks you to picture an earlier version of the place, when the Cumberland still ran as a working river and a group of boys followed their leader up into these same hills.
Stand at the marker and let the scale of the thing sink in. There is no grand monument here, no visitor center — just a plaque marking the spot where, with nothing but a borrowed handbook and a lot of nerve, one woman started something two years ahead of the rest of the country. The modesty of it is the point.
It makes an easy stop on a Lake Cumberland trip, and a good one for families. Read the inscription, look out at the water and the woods, and think about the fifteen boys of the Eagle Troop heading out to camp — proof that history's first drafts are often written in small towns, by people whose names we are lucky to still know.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Myra Greeno Bass
Related events
- · Founding of the Eagle Troop (1908)
- · Organization of the Boy Scouts of America (1910)
Themes & tags
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