Frank Fellows Gray
Founder of 1908 Glasgow, Scotland Troop, 1909 Troop 4 Montclair, New Jersey, 1917 Camp Glen Gray, Bergen County, New Jersey
Frank Fellows Gray (December 31, 1863 – March 8, 1935), also known as Uncle, was a pioneer of Scouting in America, teacher and musician. He was a personal friend of Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell founder of the Scout Movement who on a visit to Montclair, New Jersey on February 2, 1912 bestowed the singular honor of "The Baden-Powell Troop" on Frank's Boy Scout Troop 4.
Background
After having been educated at Syracuse University, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, Frank was a teacher at Military Academies in Long Island, New York. While visiting Scottish relatives in 1907 he visited B-P at the first Scout training camp at Brownsea Island Scout camp and returned in 1908 as a participant. He is believed to have started the first Scout Troop in Glasgow, Scotland in 1908. Frank was the founder of one of the first Boy Scout Troops in the United States based on the Baden-Powell system of Scouting, Montclair, New Jersey, March 9, 1909 later to become Troop 4. Ernest Thompson Seton, Chief Scout, visited Montclair to address the Scouts, December 9, 1910. Frank is believed to have organized the first real Boy Scout Camp in the United States on Dudley Island, Sussex County, New Jersey Summer 1911. Frank is one of the organizers of the Girl Scout Movement in the Montclair area, 1912–1913. He also founded, in 1914, the ‘Old Guard’, an honor society for preservation of ‘scout camping’.
The public source identifies “Frank Fellows Gray” as founder of 1908 Glasgow, Scotland Troop, 1909 Troop 4 Montclair, New Jersey, 1917 Camp Glen Gray, Bergen County, New Jersey. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Frank, Fellows and Gray.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frank Fellows Gray” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.