A Brief History of Camp Cachalot:
Recent History, and the End of Cachalot
Towards the close of the 1990s, Moby Dick Council began to preemptively discuss a merger with the Councils it was involved with for SEMCA, and somewhat later in four-way merger discussions with those Councils plus the Old Colony Council. These talks did not lead to an actual merger, as the representatives of the four Councils were never able to arrive at a plan that was amenable to their respective Executive Boards, so SEMCA continued in the same state it had been in.
In 2002, Moby Dick Council's Scout Executive, Gerald Monahan, retired. It was at this point that the Council was informed that no new executive would be hired to replace him, and without a Scout Executive no charter for the Council could be issued. Soon after, Narragansett Council approached the Moby Dick Executive Board with an offer to merge, keeping the two existing districts as districts of the merged Council, and maintaining Cachalot as a property of the new Council. The Board accepted, and the Moby Dick Council ceased to be, with final approval coming with an act of the Massachusetts State Legislature [1] in September of 2003.
At the time, Cachalot was unique among the eight camps then operated by the Narragansett Council, as it was the only camp actually owned by the Council [2]. The remaining seven camps are owned by the Rhode Island Boy Scouts (RIBS) but operated by the Council. The Rhode Island Boy Scouts are one of the multiple Scouting organizations in the United States that merged with the early Boy Scouts of America [3], but unlike other such organizations never relinquished ownership of the camps they operated.
In addition to the Councils themselves merging, a new Order of the Arrow lodge was formed out of Narragansett's Wincheck Lodge (#534) and Moby Dick's Neemat Lodge (#124). Unlike the previous Noquochoke/Agawam Lodge merger, it was possible to take any open lower number for the newly formed Lodge, and not just the older Neemat number. The resulting lodge was Abnaki Lodge #102, with the lodge number selected on the basis of the date of the merger.
Construction in the early 2000s in camp included a set of 3-season cabins built mainly to house the summer camp staff, dubbed "Magee Village", the addition of a shower facility on the back side of the Trading Post, and the siding of the Trading Post in rough-edged wood siding to better fit in with other buildings in Camp. Work also continued on completing the build-out of modern shower and latrine facilities in all of the summer camp sites, with the most recent addition being made in 2005.
In 2005, Cachalot was called upon to play host to a number of units displaced from Narragansett's Camp Yawgoog by an unexpected (and temporary) closure due to a norovirus outbreak, with members of the newly-formed Alumni Association pitching in to help welcome and orient these first-time Cachalot visitors.
Further Mergers
In 2015, among continuing consolidation of councils throughout the northeast, Narragansett Council merged with the Annawon Council of Massachusetts, one of the SEMCA partners, adding neighboring Camp Norse to the properties owned by the council. Abnaki Lodge would merge with Annawon's Tulpe Lodge, keeping the Tulpe name and the Abnaki number to form Tulpe 102.
The End of an Era
In the Fall of 2017, new Narragansett Scout Executive Tim McCandless, along with other council leaders, called for a fireside chat in Tiverton, RI. This chat was to announce sad news for the Cachalot family: 2017 would be the last year of a summer camp program at Cachalot. Once again, declining membership and financial concerns would make it difficult for the council to sustain Boy Scout summer camp programs at both Cachalot and at the much larger Camp Yawgoog.
The Association continued after the close of summer camp to do everything it could to ensure Cachalot remained a vibrant, vital piece of the Scouting program in Southeastern Massachusetts. We continued to improve the year-round camping facilities, collaborated with the organizers of great events like the Klondike Derby and the Highland Games, and made sure that Scouts continued to enjoy “the place we know so well.”
Unfortunately, we could not stave off Cachalot’s end as a Scout camp.
In the summer of 2021, the Narragansett Council informed us that Cachalot would be sold, as a part of the payment of the Council’s portion of the National Council’s bankruptcy settlement to create a victim’s trust for those who had been abused in Scouting. Many Scout camps would suffer the same fate as a result of this bankruptcy, the end result of many decades of poor decision making by the National organization.
On June 17, 2022, at 12:39pm, Cachalot's deed was transferred to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
While we are sad that Scouts of the future will not be able to know Cachalot as most of us have, we are glad that some folks had the foresight in the 1990s to enter into the Conservation Restriction, as camp will now be public land owned by the Commonwealth. Although it will certainly change, it will remain open and even potentially usable for Scout programs, and will not suffer the ignominius fate of becoming housing developments, solar farms, or agricultural land that many of the other camps being sold will become.
< Previous: The 1990s[1] Chapter 70 of the Acts of 2003, required because of then-current Massachusetts law preventing mergers of Massachusetts-based charitable organizations with organizations based outside of Massachusetts.
[2] A later merger of Narragansett and Annawon Council would add Camp Norse to the list of Council-owned properties.
[3] The Rhode Island Boy Scouts were formed in the summer of 1910, just after the Boy Scouts of America (its founders were unaware that the BSA had been formed when RIBS was established). It was 1917 when RIBS merged with the BSA. There were other organizations similar to RIBS, some of which predated the BSA, that merged with the early BSA, including Dan Beard's "Sons of Daniel Boone".
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This page was last modified on Mon Jun 20th 2022.
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