In honor of National Outdoors Day we present this post by Laura Burns, Library Support Specialist.

I recently helped process the Athens Girl Scout Collection for the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections. It was donated to the archives by Lois Whaley. The collection includes correspondence with the national girl scouts, leaders’ meeting minutes, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, and documents pertaining to Camp Rotan. The scrapbooks begin with the start of Girl Scouts in Athens in 1927 and include information about the donation of 13 acres from the Rotary to build Camp Rotan in 1933 and then the building of the Grace Poston Biddle Lodge a year later.

This collection brought back many memories for me for I was an Athens Girl Scout. The girl scout troops in Athens used and enjoyed Camp Rotan throughout the years, and it was where I got my first experience camping, gathering firewood, building fires, making Sit-upons, learning knife skills. We had to carry knives to school because the troop meetings would be after school. It never occurred to anyone that scouts of any gender would resort to knife violence. We were taught how to handle a knife. How to use it properly. We wore them on lanyards around the neck and the adults at the time were more concerned with tucking the knife under your shirt so that when you ran it didn’t hit your mouth and knock out a tooth.

All Athens troops camped at Rotan and used it for many of our Girl Scout ceremonies. When I became a brownie, back in 1970 it was at the brownie spring pond in Camp Rotan. (I have something in my pocket that belongs across my face…) My fly-up ceremony was conducted across the swinging bridge also at Camp Rotan. The bridge was awesome and was supported from the top. It would swing and sway as you crossed the steep ravine, but it was torn down years ago due to safety. Working in a library I thought I would find the proof to support the rumor that some of the Engineering students at OU made the swinging bridge as a project for a grade. I did not find any info to support this rumor. But Oley Olson who the camp has since been renamed after, her husband Thor Olson was the wrestling coach for OU and believed that young men needed chores and projects to keep them from becoming juvenile delinquents. He started out as a piano builder, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had “volunteers” from his team build the swinging bridge and build the stairs behind the lodge that went straight up a cliff.

This collection was started by leaders in 1927 when girl scouting started in Athens and passed through the hands of many troop leaders, probably even my mother, over the years. It is a good collection to peruse and reminisce if you are or were a Girl Scout. (Now, to get another song stuck in your memory.) She has a G for generosity, she has an I for interest too….