Blue Ridge Mountains Council
| Blue Ridge Mountains Council | |||
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| Owner | Boy Scouts of America | ||
| Location | Roanoke, Virginia | ||
| Country | United States | ||
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Website http://www.bsa-brmc.org |
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| Blue Ridge Scout Reservation | |||
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| Location | Pulaski County, Virginia | ||
| Founded | 1949 | ||
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Website http://www.brmcreservation.org |
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| Tutelo Lodge | |||
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Website http://www.tutelo161.org |
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The Blue Ridge Mountains Council is a Boy Scouts of America council located in Roanoke, Virginia that serves Scouts in southwest and south central Virginia. The Blue Ridge Mountains Council owns and operates the Blue Ridge Scout Reservation in Pulaski County, Virginia. The local Order of the Arrow lodge is the Tutelo Lodge.
The council is part of Area 7 of the Southern Region of the BSA. The council service center is in Roanoke, Virginia. The council has over 470 units sponsored by over 300 community organizations. BRMC is divided into six districts:
Blue Ridge Scout Reservation is located in Pulaski County, Virginia on a 17,500 acres (71 km2) property, almost 8% of the total county area. The reservation consists of Camp Powhatan, and Camp Ottari, with a network of over 100 miles (160 km) of mountainous trails crossing the land between the two base camps. It is the largest council-owned Scout Reservation in the United States and provides summer camping experiences to over 10,000 participants each summer.
After the Civil War's Battle of Cloyd's Mountain near Radford, Virginia, the Union Army pushed farther south. One company stopped for the night on a tract of land on what is now the Blue Ridge Scout Reservation. One of the soldiers who worked for a Philadelphia iron works discovered that the rocks there contained a great deal of iron ore. After the war was over, the employee interested his firm, R.D. Wood and Sons, in the land. The company purchased the tract to establish iron mining there. By 1885, it was a thriving operation. By 1905, it was inactive. It was during this time that the Iron Furnace was built, which would later become the emblematic structure on the Reservation. When the last member of the original family, Walter Wood, died in 1934, he willed the land to Radford College, now Radford University "to be used to the best possible advantage." Radford College chose to sell the land in order to fund a concert organ for its music program. The Virginia General Assembly authorized the sale. The Blue Ridge Mountains Council (Roy Webb, a local of Pulaski, also put in bids for land, and got a little over 300 acres in the sale, including the Iron Furnace, a hiking trail that Mr Webb cut out was named after him, it runs off Dead Pine Mnt) put in the successful bid of $56,100 and acquired the 15,000-acre (61 km2) tract, plus two farms with 216-acre (0.87 km2) combined.
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