Baiting Hollow Scout Camp celebrates 100 years

When it comes to talking about Baiting Hollow Scout Camp, Andrew Philp is starstruck.

The night sky has the 11-year-old under its spell.

"I just like sleeping outside," Andrew said. "I live in Nesconset, so you can’t see a lot of stars because of the houses. Last night we had a campfire, and we all looked up at the stars."

The camp, on Long Island’s North Fork, marks its 100th anniversary this year. For more than 10 decades it has been a place where hundreds of boys ages 11 to 17 — and in the last few decades, also girls — learn more than just archery, knot tying or how to row a boat. They spend weeks on more than 200 acres of woodlands in Calverton, revisiting pre-cellphone days when screens were just used to keep mosquitoes out.

They sleep in rustic cabins or in mint-green canvas tents on platforms grouped in semicircles, each tent group around a firepit with tree-stump stools and a picnic table. On a recent weekday, clotheslines strung between trees held wet bathing suits and damp towels from their swims in the freshwater Lake Arrowhead, where campers cool off after making heart-pumping hikes up and down what they affectionately refer to as Cardiac Hill.

Baiting Hollow is the "epicenter" of Scouting America  in Suffolk County, local Scouting leaders say. "It really is like the heartbeat," said Kimberly Russell, the camp’s first female director, who took the position this year. 

Beyond summer camp, the property hosts troop camping trips in tents and cabins throughout the year, as well as holiday events.

"It is heavily used and is really one of the gems we have in the Scouting program," said Chris Coscia, CEO of Scouting America Long Island, which formed in May to merge Nassau County’s Theodore Roosevelt Council and the Suffolk County Council.

MERIT BADGES AND TACOS

Each summer day starts early — a recent optional pre-breakfast Polar Bear swim began at 6:30 a.m., for instance, said Christopher Philp, a high school science teacher from Nesconset who is Scoutmaster of Troop 301 of St. James and served as assistant camp director until a few years ago. He recently spent a week at camp with his son Andrew, as his own father had done when he was a boy in the 1980s, and his daughter Emily, 16, is on staff for the summer.

After flag raising and breakfast, the morning is filled with merit badge workshops — campers choose four badges they want to earn during the week. Completing 21 merit badges is required to reach the highest level of Eagle Scout.

One recent morning, Andrew took stand-up paddleboards out on the water with Teddy Davis, 11, of Troop 809 in Maryland, while Andrew’s sister Emily taught a rowing class. "When you lift your arms up too much, they’re going to pop out of the oar locks," Emily instructed the three boys in the boat. "So, make sure you keep them down a little bit."

Lunchtime — on a recent Tuesday, lunch was, of course, tacos — included the saying of grace, Scouts serving as waiters and the singing of songs. The raising of the three-finger Boy Scout sign caused the room to fall quiet for announcements.

"We eat family style," Christopher Philp explained, at long picnic tables. "It reinforces the communication and table manners. They can’t grab over each other. They can’t stand. They’re supposed to say, ‘Please pass the cheese.’ "

‘SNAKE BUGS’ AND TUG-OF-WAR

At a lunch table, boys from Troop 565 of Smithtown recounted a funny story from a climbing merit badge session. "I’m at climbing for my first day, right, and the counselor asked, ‘What bugs besides spiders can harm you by biting you at Baiting Hollow?’ And somebody said, ‘A snake,’ " said Nick Krause, 13, of Nesconset. That’s become a running joke — a snake bug.

Each afternoon brings free time or small group challenges — such as one troop challenging another to a tug-of-war match — meant to build a sense of healthy competition, Philp said.

Evenings include social events. "There are some traditional songs and skits that are done at the campfire," said Jim Grimaldi, who started at the camp as a camper in 1981 and served as camp director for 24 years until he passed the torch to Russell this summer. 

Sometimes troops from other states come to the camp, such as Troop 809 from Jarrettsville, Maryland, which brought 13 campers for a week. "This is our second time up here," said Chris Eder, one of the Scout masters. "The boys knew it was the 100th anniversary this year and wanted to come up."

‘I HAD HAIR’

A temporary 100th anniversary museum is housed in a shipping container on the grounds as Scouting America Long Island seeks a more permanent location for it. Inside, snapshots of campers and staff members are displayed, and they date back decades. Merit badge patches are on view as well as old books such as the "Field Book for Boys and Men" and the "Cub Scout Songbook." A flyer for the camp’s inaugural 1926 summer urges boys to "Get Your Scout Buddy and Come Along."

"I spent 45 minutes in here looking through all the pictures," said Ryan Person, 44, of Center Moriches, an engineer for the Long Island Rail Road and Scout Master of Troop 414 of Center Moriches. "This is me," he said, pointing to a group photo from1999 and joking, "I had hair."

In the mid-1980s, the Suffolk County Boy Scout Council put together a history that included information about the camp. "Without a doubt, the most important event of 1926 was the purchase of property at Baiting Hollow," the history recounts, stating that the price for the original 160 acres was $70,000 and that 64 campers attended the first summer. 

An original description of the camp calls it "A Boy’s Paradise" and states that "A Scout ... keeps a close guard on his temper and never makes a silly spectacle of himself by losing his head. He keeps a close guard on his tongue for he knows that loud speech is often a weakness and that untruthfulness shatters the confidence of others." It assures parents that their son’s camp experience "will fit him in every way for stronger manhood."

In 2019, girls formally entered Scouting America and today 15% of Scouting America Long Island’s membership are girls, Coscia said.

BENT NAILS

Both Person and Geoff Bosworth, 47, of Coram, a retired New York City police officer who was a camper more than 30 years ago and whose two teenage sons are now campers, said they can remember a time a few decades ago when the camp was struggling financially. "We were taking bent nails and straightening them out to reuse them," Bosworth said. "There was just no money out here to keep the place up and running."

Person recalled that if you saw something someone had put out at the side of the road and thought it could be useful at camp, you took it.

Scouting has indeed had its share of economic woes over the past 10 years. The national organization declared bankruptcy in 2020 and has since emerged from it, Coscia said. It agreed to a settlement of more than $2 billion in 2022 to men who said they were sexually abused as Scouts.

On Long Island, the formerly named Suffolk County Council sold property in Medford in 2022 to meet financial obligations, Coscia said. Over the past decade, membership initially declined by half, in part due to the drop in in-person programming during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has since stabilized at 10,000 youths across both counties, Coscia said. The Nassau and Suffolk councils merged this year to improve efficiency and programming, Coscia said. "For the past several years, both preceding councils, and now the merged Scouting America Long Island, have been and are in a strong financial position," he said, with "healthy operating reserve funds" and no debt. Baiting Hollow is funded in the newly merged council’s $4.8 million 2026 operating budget, which includes fees paid by campers.

Today, in part because of the year-round rental fees and the donation of volunteer labor, there’s air conditioning in the dining hall, a new high-ropes course, and a new 40-person cabin called McMorris Lodge in honor of 12-year-old Andrew McMorris, the Wading River Scout killed by a drunken driver while walking in Manorville with his troop in 2018. With volunteer labor and donations, for instance, the $1.5 million cabin was built for $300,000, Grimaldi said.

"Somebody’s in the cabin all but three weekends a year," Grimaldi said. Person said his troop rents the cabin for a Scoutsgiving Thanksgiving celebration, for instance, each November.

"Scouting has changed a little bit too," Grimaldi said. "Kids and adults weren’t going to accept what was acceptable in the 1950s and '60s — outhouses, rugged camping. You had to catch up."

COMING-OF-AGE

Parent Samantha Boutis, 47, a school psychologist from Nesconset whose son is a camper, praised the camp as "a great space for kids to be able to experience the outdoors and have the freedom to go on little adventures and still be close to home and in a supervised setting."

For a kid, the camp is "a big playground," Philp said. "There’s a lot of things you can’t do at home — climbing wall, archery, rifle shooting, cooking over a fire ... all those skills are learned here." Camp gave him, and others, lifelong friends, some of them the groomsmen in his wedding, some of them becoming godparents to one another's children.

"There was freedom for us to learn who we were going to be," Bosworth said of his coming-of-age experience as a camper 30 years ago. "There’s this point in adolescence when you figure out who you are. The difference between right and wrong. The sense of responsibility. It kind of shapes your future, being out here."