WaBak Patches, Plaques, Porches, and Parks
Traditional Stuff No Comments 
big boy mountain, camp wabak, city slickers, greenville sc, history, lois, old 96 council, outdoors, patches, upstate sc
It’s WaBak time again, y’all! Here’s an update with all sorts of WaBak tidbits!
Patches
If you haven’t seen the WaBak patch collection I’ve got going on, take a peek! I add new ones (or old ones!) when I run across them, so be sure to visit the page every now and then. I recently added the 2018 camp edition:
Plaques
A blog post from last year called Surveys, Rogues, and Signs featured icons that were used on WaBak signs back in the 80s and 90s (if this is not correct, I’m sure Lois will let me know 😉 ). I wondered what they would look like on a sign, so I made these door plaques using woodburning just for the heck of it. I gave them away as gifts.
Porches aka The Original Lodge
All right, I cheated a little bit. This part is really about the original lodge at WaBak. I HAD to keep the P alliteration going in the title, and using the word Lodge just messed things up.
I originally found the above icons in the WaBak 50th Anniversary booklet that you can download here: Camp Wabak 50th Anniversary Booklet. Thanks to Lois Graves for scanning it in. I featured the historical timeline from it in a blog post from three years ago – who knew I’d still be writing about WaBak at that time? Not me!
Lois was kind enough this past summer to visit our Brownies and Juniors during our service unit’s summer camp called City Slickers to talk about what it was like when she was a Girl Scout and also as a camp director at WaBak and working for the Old 96 council. She brought a lot of items with her including an original copy of the booklet. I was able to get a clearer picture of the original Lodge featured on the cover. The lodge, originally owned by the Brooks family, was already built on the land that the Greenville Girl Scout Council initially purchased for the camp. And its name was… wait for it… WaBak! Didn’t see that coming, did you?
A screened porch was added in the early 1950s (see, here’s something about a porch!). The lodge was dedicated in 1960 to Helen Fisher, the Greenville Girl Scout Council executive director at the time WaBak was purchased and established. But time marches on, and in 1997, it was torn down in order to make way for the Rambler Lodge and replacement Rambler cabin units that you see today.
Parks
The Greenville Journal reported recently that Jones Gap State Park, located not too far from WaBak, is adding 680 acres to its already 955 acres thanks to a donation from Naturaland Trust. I borrowed the map from this article, and here is my best guessimate where WaBak lies. It didn’t line up exactly with Google Maps, so it was hard to tell where exactly things fall. Let me know if I’m off base:
Be sure to visit the article to see a neat video and some beautiful photography of the area. I probably wouldn’t have included this update, but the article featured an AWESOME shot of Big Boy Mountain right at the very beginning. Check it out!
Addendum 8/23/18: Rec’d permission to use photograph:
