Scouting, Volume 78, Number 4, September 1990 Page: 34
98, E1-E12, [8] p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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"W-^VERY SO OFTEN
a J a cry of alarm goes
Ml j up about the sad
" state of education in
America. Most recently, con-
cern focused on an apparent
ignorance of geography
among the nation's young. Ac-
cording to tests, some students
did not know where Canada
was, many could not begin to
read a map, and it was feared
that large numbers would not
even be able to find their way
around their own hometown.
One group of young people
who definitely don't fit this de-
scription are the Scouts in
Troop 3 of Hatboro, Pa., who
not only can find Canada, but
spent the last four years map-
ping, surveying, measuring,
and finally building their town
in the basement of their Scout-
master's home.
The project, which ulti-
mately involved about 1,500
hours of work was dreamed up
by Robert John, a Hatboro
lawyer and Scoutmaster of
Troop 3. John, an energetic,
silver-haired man with a per-
manent smile and sparkle in
his lively eyes, had made a
small scale model of a Scout
camp in New Jersey some 20
years earlier. He reasoned that
the project would give the
Scouts excellent training in
such skills as map reading, to-
pography, surveying, measur-
ing, and a host of other benefits
from cooperative work to com-
munity service ("Every town
should have a three-dimen-
sional model on hand," John
says), and finally, a good deal
of fun.
But making the model also
involved a lot of plain, hard
work. First came the difficult
Troop 3's Boy Scouts have
no excuse for getting lost
in town. After all, they
spent four years building
Hatboro, Pennsylvania,
from the ground up.
Miniature replicas of town
buildings, like this church,
reveal exacting detail.
Troop 3 Scouts Craig and Chris Lutz, David Siwy, E.P. Bock, and Todd Cooper show
off their homemade hometown of Hatboro, Pa.
process of enlarging the topo
map of the Hatboro quadran-
gle some 20 times from its
original 1:24,000 scale to a
scale of 1:100 feet. This means
that one foot of model would
represent 100 feet in real life.
The giant blowup was then cut
into sections and traced onto
pieces of 3/s-inch plywood,
each piece representing 10 feet
in elevation. These pieces were
then cut out and piled one on
top of the other till the whole
section was done, and the
pieces could be glued and
nailed into a single mass.
At this stage, Hatboro in
K^OO/O
Scoutmaster Bobert John gives Scouts instructions on building
the town model while referring to an oversized contour map.
34
September 1990 Scouting
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Boy Scouts of America. Scouting, Volume 78, Number 4, September 1990, periodical, September 1990; Irving, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth353668/m1/34/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Boy Scouts of America National Scouting Museum.