The telephone's Boston roots

This year marks much more than the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We are also celebrating the 150th anniversary of the independence of oral/aural telecommunication, by virtue of Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876. Since we owe Bell a bell-ringing for making possible our cellphones in our pockets, at the ready to send and receive calls, text messages, photos, videos and much more, I wonder how many are aware of the phone's Boston roots. Stumbling on this c.1900 Facebook image of Court Street, I instantly recognized the Palace Theatre building on the right as where it all began, up in the cozy attic shown above.

109 Court Street, Boston, 1879. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

At that time, 109 Court Street was a handsomely modest brick rowhouse that blended so many architectural styles it was hard to categorize: Gothic (lancet arches), Romanesque (round arches), Neoclassical (paneled pilasters and Corinthian capitals) Victorian Brick (keystones and corbelled cornice), and French Second Empire (Mansard slate roof, which gave Bell the space to do his work in secret). Oddly enough, Bell's dormer blends the Gothic lancet with the Romanesque round arch. Perhaps this stylistic indefinition foreshadowed the unpredictable novelty of the telegraphic-telephonic experimentation taking shape up there at the hands of both its owner and his most famous employee.

Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory, as reconstructed at
185 Franklin Street (Verizon Building), Boston. Photo by
Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of Library of Congress.

Bell's laboratory (here reconstructed in the lobby of the New England Telephone & Telegraph Building, later the Verizon Building, at 185 Franklin Street, Post Office Square, in the 1940s after 109 Court Street was demolished in 1931) occupied the attic after telegraphic instrument manufacturer Charles Williams Jr. set up shop in 1862 in the attic and the loft below at 109 Court Street, where he built a weight-driven telegraph he patented, and built a duplex telegraphy system for the Franklin Telegraph Company's use on its transmission lines between Boston and New York. In 1868, Thomas Alva Edison worked in Williams' shop, developing a self-adjusting relay, a stock printer, a fire-alarm-signaling telegraph, a vote-recorder for legislative bodies (which he patented), and a double transmitter for duplex telegraphy, all born in Williams' Boston office.

Williams rebuilt 109 Court Street as pictured above and to the right in 1868 after a fire, giving it tall windows and a dormered Mansard roof – elements of High Victorian Gothic architecture – to illuminate, expand, and externally express the high ceilings, roomy laboratories and sunlight needed for such detailed, in-demand work as telegraph instrument production for the telegraphy that had swept the country since Samuel B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed Morse code and the electric telegraph by 1844. Williams went on to patent a pocket-sized telegraph set (a forerunner to today's pocket phones!) and a Phelps/Western Union pattern camelback telegraph key, helping to make Boston a national leader in telegraph instrument manufacturing. This was the perfect opening for Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Augustus Watson to expand telegraphy into the vocal and aural realm. 

Williams hired Watson as a binding-post turner on a hand lathe, and soon Watson was learning about the scientific principles of electricity behind the telegraph inventors' work he was involved in through study from a library Williams provided and tutoring from Moses Farmer, a leading electrician, who manufactured the Thermo-Electric Battery in the same building.   

Painting of Alexander Graham Bell (left) and Thomas Augustus Watson (right)
in Bell's laboratory, 1876, artist unknown. Image courtesy of MIT Museum.

Alexander Graham Bell, Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory, arrived in Williams' shop early in 1874 while working with Farmer on an apparatus and went straight over to Watson for assistance with a transmitter and a receiver of a harmonic telegraph he was developing, that he hoped would send 6-8 messages at diverse pitches at the same time over a single wire.

After failing in this attempt, Bell, an aficionado of sound, language, speech and elocution since growing up with a deaf mother, offered another proposal to Watson in 1875: "If I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air vries in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech."

Beginning on June 2, Bell and Watson experimented away together in that attic with sending multiple telegraph messages at the same time over one line among three stations, two in Bell's office, one in Watson's room. Each station's transmitter and receiver contained a spring steel reed placed over an electromagnet and clamped at one end so its vibration's pitch could be adjusted to get the right pitch on both the transmitting and receiving ends. This led to his disovery of a way to produce a varying electromagnetic circuit, the first step in his development of the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone prototype, 1876.

To keep this experiment in secret until it could be patented, Bell leased two rooms half a mile from Williams' shop in the attic of 5 Exeter Place in Boston's Bay Village, where Watson set up a lab. Bell received his telephone patent on March 7, 1876, and the magic moment occurred on March 10 when Bell spoke into Watson's reed receiver between the Exeter Place rooms, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you."

Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone prototype, 1876, full version. Photo: Zubro.

While Alexander Graham Bell promoted and developed his life-changing invention by exhibiting it in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876 and sending the first phoned-in news dispatch to The Boston Daily Globe from Salem to Boston the following year...

...its birthplace went through a development of its own. By the 1890s, theater impresario William Austin had converted it into the New Palace Theatre, replacing its neoclassical first floor with a wide-arched theater entrance to lure audiences into its live stage variety and vaudeville acts...

...which eventually was replaced with a larger, wider, single-arched entrance with more prominent electric signage, to make room for a more comprehensive box office and to make the theater stand out and flash its lights on the street, especially in the evening, when most performances took place. 

Even in its reincarnation, the New Palace Theatre was dubbed "The Birthplace of the Telephone" in its publicity, perhaps to double the theater's drawing power by landmarking it as a place where history was made (even though the actual history was made at 5 Exeter Place; only the experimentation that led to the birth of the telephone was performed at 109 Court Street).

The New Palace Theatre, 109 Court Street, 1916.

By 1916, the New Palace Theatre was showing Charlie Chaplin film comedies, as well as early silent serial films and cliffhangers. 

In his book The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone, based on an address he delivered before the Third Annual Convention of the Telephone Pioneers of America at Chicago, on October 17, 1913, Thomas A. Watson himself wrote, "The building where these first telephone experiments were made is still in existence. It is now used as a theater. The lower stories have been much altered, but that attic is still quite unchanged and a few weeks ago I stood on the very spot where I snapped those springs and helped test the first telephone thirty-seven years and seven months before."

Marker of the site of the birthplace
of the telephone. Photo by Stephen Z.

Alas, no more. The New Palace Theatre and The Garrett – the nickname Bell and Watson gave to the attic "where Bell Verified the Principle of Electrical Speech Transmission," in Watson's words – fell to the wrecking ball in 1931, as another example of Boston's reluctance to preserve its past as living, breathing historic landmarks for future generations, just like the Province House and Hancock Manor I discussed in previous posts. But had 109 Court Street survived, it would have likely fallen in the annihilation of Scollay Square for the construction of Government Center in the 1960s. For now a marker with a relief image of Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone marks the site where it all began – and what we can no longer see, as Bell's laboratory reconstruction was dismantled when the Verizon Building was sold around 2009. At least that phone in your pocket preserves the memory.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Alexander Graham Bell," Wikipedia, last edited on 26 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

"Alexander Graham Bell: Scottish Pioneer of the First Ever Telephone," Scotland's Wild, https://www.scotlandswild.com/alexander-graham-bell

Bellizzi, Courtney, "A Forgotten History: Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse," Smithsonian Institution Archives, May 24, 2011, https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/forgotten-history-alfred-vail-and-samuel-morse

"Bell's laboratory, museum display," Science Photo Library, 87 Lancaster Road, London W11 1QQ, United Kingdom, https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/476491/view/bell-s-laboratory-museum-display

"Charles Williams Jr., Part One: Experimental Apparatus Made to Order," Telegraph-History.org, https://www.telegraph-history.org/charles-williams-jr/

"Charles Williams Jr., Part Two: Human Voice sent via Telegraph," Telegraph-History.org, https://www.telegraph-history.org/charles-williams-jr/part2.html

Fox, Jeremy C., "142 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell made the ‘first telephone message’ in a phone call to The Boston Globe," The Boston Globe, February 12, 2019, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/12/years-ago-globe-and-alexander-graham-bell-made-history/eps7LNZk245BoBNykVO5EJ/story.html?event=event12

Klein, Christopher, "Alexander Graham Bell's Laboratory," HubTrotter: Blogging about travel and history in Boston and beyond, April 17, 2008, https://hubtrotter.blogspot.com/2008/04/alexander-graham-bells-laboratory.html

"Palace Theatre (Boston)," Wikipedia, last edited on 3 July 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_Theatre_(Boston)

"Palace Theatre (Boston) Facts for Kids," Kids Encyclopedia Facts, last modified on 17 October 2025, https://kids.kiddle.co/Palace_Theatre_(Boston)

"Prototype telephone constructed by Alexander Bell," Science Photo Library, https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/363644/view/prototype-telephone-constructed-by-alexander-bell

Shea, Andrea, "Bell’s first phone call made history 150 years ago in Boston," WBUR, Field Guide to Boston, March 10, 2026, https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/03/10/first-telephone-call-150-years

Watson, Thomas A., The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone, an address delivered before the Third Annual Convention of the Telephone Pioneers of America at Chicago, October 17, 1913, Information Department, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/54506/pg54506-images.html

A haunted basement!

Now that another Halloween has darkened our doors and sparked the next generation of costume-festooned trick-or-treaters to stick out their spook-bags for their month's supply of cand-outs, I thought I'd make my annual night-walk to the Haunted Basement, a spine-tingling event put on annually on Halloween by Natasha Ruggieri-Koret, a clerk and notary public at the Watertown Free Public Library, and her live-in partner in the basement of their Watertown home. It's a carefully crafted collection of skulls, skeletons, witches, warlocks, masks, monsters, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, corpses, cadavers, stiffs, and any scary apparition your imagination can conjure up. This year's event had a Christian theme, mixing Jesus and the Virgin Mary in with the purgatorial phantasms, as if we were experiencing the Decensus before the Resurrection. Behold:

Too scary for words? I thought so too. But I hope this won't become The Nightmare Before Christmas for you. Happy Halloween!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

A prince of a Province House

Province House (1679), Boston, image from 1905.

Province Court, Boston, 1901.

I love stumbling upon images of old Boston on Facebook and Instagram. They inspire my next blog posts, and they teach me volumes about what particular neighborhoods I thought I knew once looked like, recording the memory of buildings I never heard of, and wish I could see now. This left-hand image of Province Court in 1901 is no exception, with its Beacon Hill-style brick rowhouses along a narrow alley, ending up at what I presume is Province Street in one of the cozier enclaves of Downtown Crossing. But the memory this image sparks the most is that of the building the court and the street were named after: the long-gone Province House, a majestic colonial brick mansion that was home to the Massachusetts Bay Colony's royal governors from 1716 to 1776.

Since its demolition in 1922, its remnants have been the granite steps and lanterned cast-iron gateway arch to its gardens (now to Bosworth Street), which The Abbey Group preserved during their development of the 45 Province Condominium in 2009, following Nathaniel Hawthorne's warning about the Old Province House's decrepit state in his book Legends of the Province House (1838-39): "...any jar or motion was apt to shake down the dust of ages out of the ceiling of one chamber upon the floor of that beneath it." 

Provincial propriety
 

Province House, image by Edwin Whitefield, 1889.

Memorialized by The Abbey Group with a pair of bronze plaques on the old garden stone wall (one of which lists all Massachusetts governors to date), the Province House was first built in 1679 on Washington Street in Downtown Crossing as the private home of wealthy London emigrant merchant Peter Sergeant. Like the 45 Province Condominium's developers, Sergeant built high, wide and strong, hiring the best of local English artisans and builders and embellishing his Jacobean mansion with "the latest stylistic refinements of houses of the English gentry," according to historian Fay Campbell Kaynor. Its three-story height, high basement and gable, and distinctive cupola, topped by a copper Native American archer weathervane now exhibited at the Massachusetts Historical Society, made it the ultimate in the upward mobility of Boston's emerging Brahmin class. Its high tower gave Sergeant a privileged perspective on Boston's landscape, as well as his own vast landscape of gardens, orchards, and a 75-square-foot front lawn.
 
Governors' grandeur
 

Renting his house to the colonial governor, the Earl of Bellmont, as early as 1699, Sergeant died in 1714. Royal Governor Samuel Schute moved in two years later, beginning the Province House's succession of gubernatorial dwellers — including Gens. William Howe and Thomas Gage, chief commanders of British forces at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775 — until the British Army evacuated Boston at the hands of General George Washington on March 17, 1776. (Thomas Hutchinson, governor during the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, did not live there.) And the house was gussied up aplenty for royal ceremonies and aristocratic balls and receptions with lavish cast-iron railings, sentry-attended front-entry gates, drawing-room tapestries, Dutch fireplace tiles, window seats, paneled wainscoting...

A tavern in the town
 

Province House, 1848, engraving by J. Rea.

After the British left Boston, the Province House was put to a smorgasbord of public and private uses — the Committee on Accounts office, the state treasurer's office, the state council's office, a boarding house, a tavern, a theater — and naturally went through umpteen overhauls over time, including the beheading of its tower when the king was dead from the scene. Rechristened the Old Province House tavern in 1835, it inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's Legends of the Province House (later published as Twice-Told Tales), where he takes us through its wainscoted, paint-peeling ballroom darkened by neighboring building shadows, up its bridal staircase ("a feature of grandeur and magnificence"), into its formerly grand rooms "cut up by partitions and subdivided into little nooks" for lodgers, and along its garret's "ponderous white oak framework so much more massive than the frames of modern houses... although the timbers are said to be as sound as ever... it is contemplated to gut the whole." 

It was gutted in the 1850s to become Ordway Hall, which attracted throngs to minstrel shows, burlesque circuses, Professor Harrington's magic acts, Signor Di Carlo's virtuoso violin, and more... until a fire gutted it on Oct. 25, 1864, leaving its brick walls standing, which later enclosed a cluster of lodgers' quarters and tradesmen's shops and was integrated into Province Court.
From royal ball to wrecking ball

Despite historian William Sumner Appleton's efforts to preserve the Province House because it "is one of the most remarkable houses of which there is record in America" and "must have been as satisfactory in its own way to a visiting Englishman of quality as a home in England," its remains were razed in 1922 for the Province Building, an office block and movie theater (now the Boston Jewelers Exchange Building). The demolition revealed rows of rare colonial brickwork, fireplaces and other unique features, including large brick quarter-circles Appleton had never seen in any period house, and an uncommon third-floor fireplace, "an added touch of luxury proving Sergeant to be a man of great wealth and position whose house might well differ from all others in ostentation and comfort."

Though the brick shell was all that remained of the original Province House, there was enough for a reconstruction, which would have put it in a proper place on the Freedom Trail as a Colonial complement to the Old Corner Bookstore and Old South Meeting House across the street, and the Old State House down Washington Street. This would have made the Freedom Trail more complete, covering Boston's Colonial period from royal governorship to revolution, as the symbol of a turning point in American history. Besides, if barely enough of Fraunces Tavern in New York, where General George Washington bid farewell to his officers after the Revolutionary War, remained for a reconstruction, Boston could have done the same with the Province House, using its fireplaces and brickwork as starting points.

What replaced the Province House was the Province Building, now the Boston Jewelers Exchange Building, a commonplace cast-stone office block saved from total white-bread blandness by some neoclassical pressed-bronze ornamentation and black marble around its entrance and along its jewelry-shop corridors, a fitting ambiance for its elegant products. 

It memorializes its predecessor with a bronze plaque marking its site, which happens to be right next to – ugh – a McDonald's. This means many people having a Big Mac attack or french-fries freakout will surely not take notice of this historic site as they rush in to grab-and-go their order to satiate their fast-food fetish as fast as possible, without slowing down to ponder and reflect upon the rich history of the area. 

(The Old Corner Bookstore across the plaza makes the same mistake, by housing a Chipotle Mexican Grill that tempts consumers and passers-by to go inside for a quesadilla or burrito, thereby diverting them from stopping to think about the rich literary history that went on inside the building, an issue I explored in a previous post.)

And look at what the Province Building did to Province Court as well: it cut it off, so that it now functions as merely a service entrance to the Boston Jewelers Exchange Building and neighboring office buildings, rather than the thriving community of plumbers, painters, carpenters, tailors and other tradespeople it once was.

This made the Province Building a very early example of "urban renewal" in Boston, involving mass demolition of run-down areas without stopping to think about the historical events that took place there and the rare surviving example of colonial Boston architecture that was crying out for attention. A big building says more than a little memorial about Boston history.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Demolition of the Province House, Washington Street, Boston, Mass., June 6, 1922," Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/196711

Kaplan, Aline, "The Province House Steps Connect 3 Centuries," The Next Phase Blog, July 21, 2016, https://aknextphase.com/province-house-steps-connect-3-centuries/

"Province House (Boston, Massachusetts)," Wikipedia, last edited on 16 February 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_House_(Boston,_Massachusetts)

"Province House, in Boston, 1848," Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/198379

"Province House, Site of," Salem Witch Museum, 2026, https://salemwitchmuseum.com/locations/province-house-site-of/

"RoadTrip New England's Post," RoadTrip New England, Facebook, March 7, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/roadtripnewengland/posts/the-province-house-stood-at-the-end-of-governors-alley-now-province-court-just-o/1512732010665268/

"The Province House," The Historical Marker Database, 2006-2026, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=176115

"The Province House stood at the end of Governor's Alley," roadtrip_newengland, Instagram, March 7, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DVmPgBnCPIH/

"View of the remains of the Province House, Washington Street, Boston, Mass., 1922), Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/196831

Summer Camp IV: Skin-and-bones Scouting

Webelos provisional Campsite Sequan at Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Rockville, Rhode Island. Photo by David R. Brierley.

The winding down of another summer on not so sweet a note—continued unemployment—prompted me to revisit my blogpost series on the summer camps I'd attended, to reminisce on simpler, closer times as well as the architecture that framed and shaped them.

T. Dawson Brown Gates, main entrance, Camp Yawgoog. Photo: KB1KOI.

Camp Yawgoog, a Boy Scout reservation in Rockville, Rhode Island that I attended in the summer of '77, is notable for a type of "organic architecture" that makes Frank Lloyd Wright's stab at that style seem even more slickly suburban, in terms of not really "roughing it" with his natural resources. 

Sandy Beach Dining Hall at Camp Yawgoog.

Sandy Beach Waterfront Boathouse, Camp Yawgoog. Photo by David R. Brierley.

Designed primarily by Rhode Island architect D. Thomas Russillo (1902-1980), the Yawgoog campus parallels some of the earth-hugging horizontality of Wright's Prairie Style and Usonian houses but is a far better example of the kind of sticks-and-stones, skin-and-bones, open-air building that makes its users more aware of the nature that surrounds them than the structures themselves. 

Three Point Waterfront at Camp Yawgoog.

It does this both by emphasizing the building materials' natural resources with hand-hewn logs, posts and beams and rough, random-ashlar fieldstones, and by eliminating most of the walls, allowing sun, breezes, green views and water views to permeate the interiors so we don't lose touch with nature.

Bucklin Memorial Building, Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Rockville, Rhode Island
designed in 1933 by architects Jackson, Robertson & Adams. Photo by J.P. Riley.

The Bucklin Memorial Building, built in 1933 from a design by Jackson, Robertson & Adams, was our "check-in" building and our formal introduction to the informality of nature, as expressed in its log-cabin woodwork and random-ashlar stonework (somewhat reminiscent of the nature-based Medievai/Craftsman style of the Adelynrood Retreat and Conference Center in Byfield, Massachusetts, where my St. Paul's Choir sang a sumer concert, discussed in an earlier post). The broad wingspread of Bucklin Memorial gave us an open-armed welcome to the open concept of nature we were in for once we passed through its gateway.

Tent at Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Photo by Robin Joubert.

But the hotel-like formality of Bucklin Memorial's design had us fooled. For we were not in for the kind of luxury, or even the basic cabin housing, that I discussed in my three previous summer camp posts. No, this time we were sleeping from Taps to Reveille in canvas tents in the great outdoors, in sleeping bags on basic bunkbeds, roughing it all the way, rain or shine, to learn survival skills.

Tents at Yawgoog Scout Reservation.

My tent was one of a circle of canvases around a central flagpole at Camp Baden-Powell. Named for Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell, it was a "sub-campsite" of Camp Sandy Beach, one of three camps comprising Yawgoog (the others were Camp Medicine Bow and Camp Three Point). Camp Baden-Powell was also one of the snootiest, boasting a self-righteous cheer:

"10! 9! 8! 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2! 1! 

Boomeracka-B! Poomeracka-P! 

Boomeracka-Poomeracka! Who Are We? 

We are the Scouts of Camp (clap, clap) B-P!"

Scoutmaster Jim: "What's the best campsite in Sandy Beach?"

Us: "BADEN-POWELL! YEAAAAAAA!" 

(On my first day, I was told to yell "Yeaaaaa!" whenever somebody said "Baden-Powell," so kids started saying it just to watch me react, until my tent leader Nick urged me to cut it out.)

Tents at Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Rockville, R.I.

Our biggest reaction was Reveille. After a far-off bugle-call while we tried to catch our last winks, a louder call burst from the flagpole: "Everybody UP!" Bump, thump, flip, rip, shake, rattle, roll. Bombs away from the top bunks as commotion filled my tent while we scrambled and scurried to cop the "FIRST UP" award plaque at first light. "C'mon, Tent Two, let's move it!" (So long, plaque.)

Pebbles and pine-needles pricked our barren soles as we fell out in front of our tent (sometimes in the rain), as the dewy air permeated our PJs and our breath was as visible as campfire smoke. "Ten-SHUN!" All erect. "Hand-SALUTE!" Right hands stationed on foreheads as the colors fluttered their daily rise up the knotty tree-limb pole (except when it was raining). Their rope was bowlined securely in place. "TWO!" Hands dropped in a chorus of thigh-slaps. "All right, inspection's in thirty-five minutes! So let's get these tents cleaned up!" Which kicked off our mad dashes to the latrine, our on-the-double donning of our Scout uniforms, neckerchiefs, caps and sneakers, and our helter-skelter scampers for the limited supply of brooms and dustpans, all at once. Floor-sweeps, trash-picks, and bed-makes became the order of the day in dread of the military-style inspection on the way.

Tent at Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Photo by Joseph Schwendt.

Fast-forward half an hour. We stumbled and fell out in front of our tents, all uniformed, on the clock – mostly. "All right, that's five points off for Tent Two!" (Good-bye, "BEST INSPECTION" plaque.) One by one, Scoutmaster Jim stared down each tent leader, who shouted in full salute, "SIR! Flaming Arrows Patrol ready for inspection! SIR!" 

Jim entered the tent to start the scrutiny: "There are pine-needles on the floor!" (But we swept everywhere!) He emerged and pointed toward our tootsies: "There's paper down there!" (But we picked up everything!) He jiggled our tent-ropes: "Too loose!" And then: "I'm taking off five more points because of that!" He pointed to me, un-uniformed. At least the latrine squad got it the worst: "The bathroom looks terrible! Sinks all dirty, hose left on the floor!" (Don't forget the cockroach that crawled out of the toilet, which I spotted on my first day.) I broke into an impromptu cackle of giggles to relieve the letdown of blowing inspection and to start the rest of the day on a cheerier note.

On that cheerier note, we marched to the mess hall for breakfast: "Left, left, left-right-left!" "Sound off!" "One-two!" "Sound off!" "Three-four!" "Bring it on down!" "One-two-three-four, one-two—THREE-FOUR!" And so on.

The Camp Sandy Beach mess hall had the same open-concept design, just as open to the air as its interior space was, kudos to its under-roof network of hammerbeams, rafters and purlins. Because of its unobstructed openness (except for the "Blue" section in a separate space, used only when there was an overflow of Scouts), it had to be divided into sections, each marked by a color: Gold, Red, Yellow, etc., with a chart of left-to-right shifted color-names that were shifted under a picture of a Scout sitting and eating or a picture of a Scout walking with a tray, to indicate when each section was scheduled to stay seated or go get food, get seconds, bring in its plates or cups for the dishwasher, etc. This was done to keep a reasonable order in a camp situation that could otherwise dissolve into mayhem.

Which it could do anyway, like the time one kid got up to go to the bathroom, and another kid sprinkled pepper in the first kid's milk. I asked him why. "He got me all wet! And [Scoutmaster] José didn't do anything about it!" More giggles from me.

Another great space at Camp Sandy Beach was the theater, where that ever-dependable roof-web of hammerbeams, rafters and purlins yielded a roomy auditorium for a smorgasbord of camp entertainment and song on the big stage, from rousing choruses of "The Green Grass Grows All Around," "Bill Grogan's Goat," "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" (where each half of the audience tried to sing it the softest, to the point where they'd be just mouthing the words), and "I Know a Man Named Michael Finnegan" (where each half of the audience tried to sing it the loudest, to the point where they'd yell it the loudest) to umpteen performances of the same old Three Stooges sketch ("NI-A-GARA FALLS! Slowwww-ly I turrrrn! Step by step! Inch by inch!") and a lot of same-old others.

And, of course, there were those chats with Jim the Moose, a talking, guffawing wall-mounted cervidae that hung by the stage, provoking cries of:

"We want the moose! We want the moose!" 

Evolving into: 

"We want the moose!" 

"SHOT!" 

"We want the moose!"

"SHOT!" (What were they talking about? He already was shot, and mounted!)

The amphitheater, modeled loosely on the Theatre of Dionysus in Greece but taking advantage of a natural incline to create stadium seating descending to a sunken stage overlooking the lake, was the other great Scout-gatherer. Sunday worship had a vivacious minister ("Jeremiah, Peter and John!" in rhythm), and the Yawgoog Choir sung flat unison renditions of hokey old hymns like "The Old Rugged Cross." 

But the evening talent shows were a blast. I remember a rousing performance of "The Monster Mash," an Abbott-and-Costello vacuum-cleaner-salesman sketch (starring yours truly), and four older guys singing a barbershop rendition of the Mickey Mouse Club theme that segued into a cackling chorus of "Old McDonald" ("M-O-U-S-EE-I-EE-I-O!").

I also fondly remember a performance of "The Mortgage on the Cow," where the actors bobbed up and down in common rhythm by their knees as they said, "Hey, Joe, you're lookin' mighty low!" "We ain't got the money for the mortgage on the cow!" "Sob, sob, sob-sob-sob!" Then someone said, "I just shot the cow!" which relieved them of their financial obligations. That may have been my favorite of all the sketches I saw at the camp (in part because it was performed only once; the others were done so often we got sick of them).

Another memorable sketch, also performed only once, involved Scouts arriving at the Pearly Gates of Heaven, presenting their Scouting records (how many Merit Badges they won, etc.) to the gatekeeper, and being denied admission to Heaven (like being rejected at a job interview). One timid Scout reported one Merit Badge and a long but undistinguished Scouting record. "What camp did you go to?" asked the gatekeeper. "Camp Yawgoog," said the Scout. "Come in. You've been in hell too long."

The high point of the amphitheatre – not hellish in any way – was a group performance of the 12 Points of the Scout Law. Scoutmasters led groups of Scouts by torchlight to far off in the woods, each Scoutmaster standing for one of the 12 points. When all were dispersed, on cue each section shouted one by one, so all could be heard all over the reservation:

"TRUSTWORTHY!"

"LOYAL!"

"HELPFUL!"

"FRIENDLY!"

"COURTEOUS!"

"KIND!"

"OBEDIENT!"

"CHEERFUL!" (my group)

"THRIFTY!"

"BRAVE!"

"CLEAN!"

"REVERENT!"

Of course, none of us was all those things. This was all for show, and maybe some hope that we would act that way someday, once we became Scoutmasters. But until then, a typical day at Camp Yawgoog went like this:

"Hey, Todd, tell us how babies are made."

Silence from me.

"We'll throw this rock at you if you don't."

Frozen silence, as I stood there, like a deer caught in the headlights, staring at the big hard rock clutched in his fingers and the thousand-yard stare in his eyes. I finally walked away.

"Nah, we're only kiddin'."

"Where do you think you're going?" snapped an adult voice.

"Over there," I said meekly.

"Don't cut through a campsite."

Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place!

A typical night, even after the "Taps" bugle call resounded softly from afar – as our cue not to bump or budge an inch in our bunks, lest we get ourselves out of the running for the "QUIET AFTER TAPS" award plaque – could be: "Oh, I got wicked bad diarrhea!" followed by fake flatulence from Ben, our tent clown, followed by giggles from me, which only encouraged Ben to keep the clowning going, which provoked Nick to tell me to stop laughing, which ultimately provoked Scoutmaster Jim to say outside, "Fall out in front of your tent." Another lecture on proper behavior from Jim, and another award plaque opportunity squandered.

But seriously, folks: Were there any Yawgoog Scouts who followed at least some of the 12 Points? Were there any positive models to follow? By all means. One caring kid once told me, "I hate it when you're teased." Another, John Hill, became my treasure-hunt partner as we scoured the camp for the buried treasure we were told about. John was as resourceful as the image of a Boy Scout could be as he carefully followed the clues we were given. As a result, he dug up the treasure chest. Expecting it to be a pirate's booty of gold coins or Pieces of Eight, we were dismayed that the chest contained a mere stock-paper certificate of congratulations for finding the treasure, with the note, "You will be awarded Sunday." The award? Just another congratulatory certificate. Plus another I got for sticking out an early-morning Polar Bear Swim in the lake that shivered my timbers like you wouldn't believe. Not too bad a way to conclude my two weeks of Scouting – a couple of minor awards to my credit, a positive Boy Scout model or two, and, yes, a few Merit Badges (which I had to pay for; they weren't just handed to me).

Amphitheatre at Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Photo by David R. Brierley.

Wilderness at Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Photo by George K.

Note that I didn't say as much about the architecture of the Yawgoog Scout Reservation as I did about that of the other three summer camps I elaborated on in previous posts. That was because Yawgoog had the least amount of architecture of all of them, in its goal to deprive its campers of the comforts of home, school, summer homes and cushier camps they hailed from and teach them the Scout-fit wilderness survival skills amid the trees, the undergrowth, the grass, the soil, the heat, the rain, the sandy beach (hence the camp's name), and the lake we were given, as the Scouts' Native American models of yore had to learn through the ways of their tribes. This time, the wilderness was the architecture.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"About Camp Sandy Beach," Yawgoog.org, https://www.yawgoog.org/camp-sandy-beach.html

"Camp Yawgoog," Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/CampYawgoog1916

"Camp Yawgoog," Scouting America, Narragansett Council, https://campreservation.com/546/Camps/436

"Camp Yawgoog," Scouting America Troop 23 Brooklyn, https://www.t23b.org/locations/camp-yawgoog

"Camp Yawgoog, Yawgoog.org, https://www.yawgoog.org/

"Welcome to Camp Yawgoog," Boy Scouts of America 2026 Leaders' Guide, https://www.yawgoog.org/uploads/6/8/4/2/68426127/2400969_bsoa-2026_leaders_guide_final.pdf

Wendell, Bryan, "Mix tradition with high-flying fun at Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Narragansett Council," Scouting Magazine, https://scoutingmagazine.org/2016/08/mix-tradition-with-high-flying-fun-at-yawgoog-scout-reservation-narragansett-council

"What are the Scout Oath and Scout Law?", Scouting America, https://www.scouting.org/about/faq/question10/

"Yawgoog Scout Reservation," Alchetron, https://alchetron.com/Yawgoog-Scout-Reservation

"Yawgoog Scout Reservation," Wikipedia, last edited on 10 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yawgoog_Scout_Reservation

"Yawgoog Scout Reservation, Narragansett Council," Scouting Magazine, YouTube, posted April 19, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJcA-Ae2-Ls