Scouts celebrate new beginning at Childress Reservation

John Hacker, The Joplin Globe, Mo.
·5 min read

Aug. 11—More than 150 current Scouts gathered recently with a number of Scout leaders and veterans of Scouting in Southwest Missouri to mark twin milestones at the Frank Childress Scout Reservation.

The Scouts marked 100 years in the Nih-Ka-Ga-Hah District of the Ozark Trails Council of Boy Scouts of America, while at the same time celebrated a new beginning for the 63-year-old Childress Reservation itself as a not-for-profit camp available to other groups in the community, not just Scouts.

"That's our goal," said Eric DeGruson, chairman of the new Frank Childress Reserve Properties Committee, which is purchasing the campground from the Ozark Trails Boy Scout Council. "it's not just to be a Scout camp. We want to be a camp for the community."

DeGruson said there is not any reason the camp cannot be used "365 days a year. The community will need to use it, too, and we need to share this resource with them. That's one of our goals."

Centennial Jamboree

The weekend of Aug. 4-6 saw the more than 150 Scouts from Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma at the Childress Scout Reservation for a jamboree, hosted by the Nih-Ka-Ga-Hah District of the BSA, to celebrate 100 years of Scouting in Southwest Missouri.

According to a news release by the Childress Reserve Property Committee, Nih-Ka-Ga-Hah was originally a Scout camp operated from the 1920s to the 1950s by the MoKan Council of Boy Scouts.

The Nih-Ka-Ga-Hah Campground was located near where the interchange of Missouri Highway 249, Interstate 44 and Interstate 49 stands now.

In the early 1960s, the council sold that campground and developed the Frank Childress Boy Scout Camp, a 200-acre former horse farm donated to the Scouts by the family of Frank Childress, a Joplin man who made his fortune in mining in the early 1900s.

The Childress Scout Reservation is located just east of the interchange of County Route V and I-49.

The MoKan Council then merged with the Springfield-based council in the 1990s, becoming Nih-Ka-Ga-Hah District under the larger Ozark Trails Council.

Last weekend, a number of emergency departments, including the Redings Mill Fire District, Newton County Sheriff's Department, Newton County Ambulance District, Joplin Police Department and others were on hand to help the Scouts earn their Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge.

Maya Bizzle, a Scout with a troop from Mountain Home, Arkansas, said she came to the event to try to earn that merit badge.

"It's been rainy, but I like this camp because it's small and you don't have to walk far," Bizzle said. "My dad got an invitation or a flyer about this, and he was like, "If you go to this, you can get part of the Emergency Prep Merit Badge." So I wanted to do it for that."

Bizzle walked the camp with her friends, Ali Adams, from Mountain Home, Arkansas, and Madalynn Rayner, from Bergman, Arkansas.

All three said camping in the rain last weekend was something different.

"I don't think the rain is a problem," Bizzle said. "I actually like the rain."

"The pancakes this morning were fun," Rayner added. "Just being able to see everything and walk around on our own time on our own pace has been good. It's not scheduled like everything else."

A new life for Childress

In 2020, the Boy Scouts of America settled a number of damaging lawsuits by former Scouts who reported they had been sexually abused by Scout leaders in decades past. The BSA was forced to declare bankruptcy and sell a number of camps as part of the settlement agreement.

The Childress Scout Reservation was one of those camps put on the auction block, but, led by DeGruson and others, Scouts in the Joplin area formed the Frank Childress Reserve Property Committee and were able to come up with the $500,000 needed to buy the 175-acre campground.

The committee will operate the campground and is working to raise another $600,000 or more to build an air-conditioned bunkhouse and make a number of other needed improvements to the site.

"We have plans for the property that will make it more accessible and desirable for many types of youth development, church, nonprofit, business and other private organizations that want to use the outdoor spaces as well as conference and meetings spaces," DeGruson said. "Outside groups have begun to partner with us, and we look forward to more joining us in this endeavor to make the camp an integral part of the community."

The committee will close on the camp purchase in October, but DeGruson said that the fundraising is continuing.

"We will have some Council equipment to replace but more importantly we are looking at a number of upgrades and additions to facilities that will make the camp usable by a wider array of groups," he said.

DeGruson said the group hopes to have a significant part of the funds raised in time to start construction on the upgrades soon.

"We have some bookings for churches next summer," he said. "It's probably not realistic to have everything built by then, but by next summer we want to be substantially underway with most of our projects."

Updates can be found at the group's Facebook page: Frank Childress Scout Reservation.