Last Scouts
On a wall in his Lancaster Township home, 89-year-old Carl Miller hangs a 4-foot-tall plaque engraved with the names of every boy who has achieved the rank of Eagle Scout through Lancaster Township's Troop 360.
Miller is the last living charter member of Troop 360. He spent 40 years as scoutmaster and more than 50 years as a council member of the Lancaster Township Friends of Scouting, and for his efforts received a Scoutmasters Award of Merit and a Silver Beaver Award, one of scouting's highest honors.
He keeps a scrapbook of thank-you notes from families, scouts and partner organizations.
“You give up a lot of your life doing something like this,” Miller said. “And they got something out of it, though it's different for each boy.”
But by the end of this month, the group that Miller spent half his life tending will be no more. Troop 360 will sell off all of its equipment at an auction at the Lancaster Community Center on July 22.
“When we have this sale,” Miller said, closing the scrapbook with a heavy thump, “that'll be the end of Troop 360.”
Troop 360 is the only Boy Scout troop in Lancaster Township. The Cub Scouts pack that fed into Troop 360 closed down in the past four years, and without that organization to direct boys to the troop, the group's numbers have dwindled rapidly.As of a few months ago, the troop was down to just one boy.“It's pretty much done right now,” said Troop 360's current Scoutmaster Chad Gallagher. “We had been trying to get the boys to invite some of their friends, but then COVID hit, and COVID didn't help anybody.”Gallagher cites competition with other activities, along with the child abuse scandals that hit scouting nationally, as having impacted the troop.“We'd been trying to increase our numbers for years, but people just haven't come on board,” he said.The troop was originally founded in 1964. At one point, its membership rolls had 40 youths. More than 60 of its boys have become Eagle Scouts.A pavilion at Boy Scout Camp Bucoco in Slippery Rock bears the troop's name and was dedicated for the troop's 50th anniversary in 2014.Over the past decade, the troop has seen changes in leadership, along with a decline in members. Gallagher has been scoutmaster since 2014. Efforts were made to restart the Cub Scout pack, but nothing stuck.“We just kept losing people,” he said.
John Gerwig, a member of the Lancaster Township Friends of Scouting committee, grew up with the troop and earned his Eagle Scout in 1982. His two sons also went through the program and earned their Eagle Scout ranks about a decade ago.“Scouting in general is in a hurt,” Gerwig said. “The boys aren't interested; the parents aren't interested. Everybody just wants to play on their phones.”Bill Hastings, a longtime member of the Troop 360 committee and the Lancaster Township Friends of Scouting, said that a lack of interest from both adults and youth, along with competition from other extracurricular activities, has impacted scouting in Lancaster.“Nobody was joining the Cub Scout troop; we couldn't get people, either adults or youth,” he said. “Lancaster is kind of an older community. There have been some new housing developments coming in, but most of the youth want to just play on their electronics, and the adults would rather put them into programs like baseball or football, where they can get scholarships.”In the end, Hastings said, the troop will just fizzle out and not recharter itself in December, when it would otherwise reregister with the national Boy Scouts organization.“It's too bad, but if you can't draw youth in, there's no sense trying to continue, because you have to have five boys to recharter,” he said.
The auction will include trailers, canoes, camping equipment, tents and even a Cub Scout Pinewood Derby racing track.“Anything you can imagine for camping, we have it,” Gerwig said. “This is 50-some years' worth of accumulated stuff. We have eight canoes; we have tents, a trailer for hauling the tents, camping equipment. You name it.”Previously, the organization's equipment had been stored in two buildings on township property. The troop had a regular auction each year to raise funds in the past.Proceeds from the sale will be divided between the Harmony Fire District and several local food pantries.
Raymond Tennent, scout executive at the Moraine Trails Council, the scout organization that oversees the Butler County area, said in an email that membership in “just about every organization” is down because of COVID-19, but that before the pandemic, scouting in Butler County was growing.“As we come out of the pandemic, I expect it to pick up and grow closer to our 2019 membership,” he said. “It may take a year or two.”Tennent said that the closing of Troop 360 isn't as unexpected as it sounds.“It really is not unusual for us to drop a pack or troop, two or three every year, though it's unfortunate,” he said. “Some of our communities are so small that they typically have scouts, because alumni move there and start a program.“Every year, we struggle with the smaller troops to begin with. Our bigger towns, like Cranberry, Zelienople, Butler, etc., are down in numbers, but have solid leadership. If one of those units dropped, it would be an ominous sign. That is not the case.”
Carl Miller doesn't expect that Lancaster Township will miss Troop 360.“Nobody has stepped in to continue it,” he said. “If they would miss it, they would've continued it.”Like the troop's other leaders, Miller thinks that it has suffered from competition with other activities, and that boys have a lot more things to fill their time these days.But he also acknowledges that not every child would be interested anyway.“Scouting's not for every boy,” he said. “That's something you find out along the way.”
