The Eagle Troop: America's First Boy Scouts

Two years before Boy Scouts of America was officially founded, a Kentucky woman was already running a scout troop here. In the spring of nineteen oh eight, Mrs. Myra Greeno Bass organized fifteen boys in Burnside, near Somerset using the official handbook of English scouting written by Robert Baden-Powell.

She called them the Eagle Troop and took them hiking and camping just as scouts do today. When the Boy Scouts of America was formally incorporated in nineteen ten, this troop was already two years old. It is one of the earliest documented scout groups in the United States, started not by a national organization but by one local woman with a handbook and a vision.