Leader Recalls First Girl Scout Camping Trip

The first Girl Scout camping trip in 1913 was a far cry from this weekend’s 13,000-girl Diamond Jubilee Roundup, according to Mildred Guckenheimer Kerr, 94, of Savannah, Ga., one of the “guide-mistresses” (leaders) who accompanied the Scouts on a two-week excursion to Ossabaugh Island, off the Georgia coast.

“It was the biggest mess, when you think of it,” Kerr recollects in her soft Savannah drawl. “How we got it together, and how those mothers allowed their children to go with us, I will never know. I was only just out of school, and we were all young people, except for “the doctor and his wife,” and she was “very pregnant at the time.”

Even before the Girl Scouts were founded the year before, groups of Savannah girls were taking excursions into the countryside with Walter John Hoxie, a naturalist who taught them botany and zoology. He later co-authored with Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts, the first handbook for the organization, “How Girls Can Help Their Country.”

Edith Battey Blun, 87, also of Savannah, a member of one of the first Girl Scout patrols (troops), recalls Saturday trips with her patrol to the countryside, which then began at the end of the streetcar line. Her photos show the girls around campfires and under the Spanish moss of the Georgia woods in blue middies (blouses), bloomers and black stockings, posing in front of a rustic cabin.

On the trip to Ossabaugh Island, the Scouts first pitched their tents on the west side of the island, “but the mosquitoes were so bad we couldn’t stay there,” Kerr says. They had to drag their cots, tents and equipment--not lightweight aluminum and nylon in those days, but heavy canvas and wood--over the high sand dunes to the eastern side.

“A lot of girls got homesickthat first night. I literally rocked them to sleep,” Kerr recalls.

Not too much later, the campers heard noises, which they imagined to be wild animals, but as the sounds got closer they could make out voices singing hymns. The intruders proved to be 14 Methodist missionaries, on the island for a wilderness retreat.

The missionaries’ presence was fortunate, because, accordingto Kerr, the expedition’s advance planning left something to be desired, and the Girl Scouts soon ran out of food.

“They kept us supplied with shrimp and crab. If it hadn’t been for them and for the caretakers on the island, Aunt Emmeline and Uncle Mitchell we would have starved. They were sent by the Lord, that was all it was.”