The Lusitania connection still echoes for area Boy Scouts at Camp Naish

The sunrise ceremony began without the sun.

A light mist began falling just after 6 a.m., but that didn’t stop about 60 Boy Scouts, with their adult leaders, from gathering around an Edwardsville gravesite on Sunday.

“We thank Mr. Naish for his legacy,” said Austin Weber, a Scout from Olathe.

“Without him, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Another Scout, Tom Ward of Overland Park, placed a fresh bouquet of flowers against a headstone which still contained, barely discernible, the outline of an ocean-going passenger liner engulfed in what appears to be billows of smoke. Two names could be read in the stone: Theodore Naish, who died in the May 7, 1915, sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat, and Belle Naish, his wife.

She helped dedicate her husband’s headstone and — upon her 1950 death — was laid to rest near it.

Before that she donated the initial land for what is today the Theodore Naish Scout Reservation, which now sprawls across about 1,100 acres. Without her, many thousands of Scouts over eight decades would not have escaped the city since the 1920s. This year about 7,300 Scouts and adult leaders are scheduled to participate in several summer sessions, the first of which begin this week.

Camp Naish leaders often have marked the beginning of the camp season with a visit to Belle Naish’s grave.

But Sunday’s ceremony seemed more necessary this year, given the 100th anniversary of the Lusitania’s sinking. This summer, during each session, adult leaders will be leading Scouts on a Naish Heritage Night Hike.

A hike is especially appropriate because Belle Naish was not a member of the “Victorian cult of the female invalid,” Naish reservation director Scott Weaver told the Scouts gathered at her grave.

That both Naishes could walk 10 miles without visible signs of fatigue would be evidence considered by an international tribunal charged, after the end of World War I, with calculating appropriate payments by the German government for the Lusitania sinking.

A tragic honeymoon

Theodore Naish walked.

“On Sunday mornings he would take off from his home in Kansas City and walk for miles,” said Andy Dubill, an Overland Park scouting historian.

“He would end up in Edwardsville.”

Soon Naish, a British-born engineer, purchased land near the Wyandotte County community, but not just any land.

It contained pastures and forests and scenic vistas. Three hills stood as the highest points in the county, some 1,000 feet above sea level. On one hill he built a cabin and — after he married Belle Saunders, a Detroit schoolteacher, in 1911 — the two spent several summers on the property.

In 1915 they decided to take a belated honeymoon to England, where Theodore had grown up in Birmingham.

They purchased Lusitania tickets at the Chicago & Alton offices in Kansas City. They traveled to New York and, on the way, discussed whether it was wise to take a British ocean liner to England.

England and Germany had declared war the previous year. In February, Germany had announced submarine warfare in the waters around England.

“We were convinced that the Germans would not sink an unarmed passenger liner loaded with neutrals and so many women and children,” Belle Naish said in a 1935 interview with The Star.

Still, both decided — in case the unimaginable occurred — that if no lifeboats remained after all women and children had been taken from the ship, the two would face their fate together.

On May 7 Belle Naish joined other passengers at the ship’s rail, admiring the distant sight of Ireland.

“It was a glorious day, the sky a perfect blue, and off there the islands of the Irish Coast, an emerald green shimmering in the sunshine of that May day,” she recalled in 1935. “I thought to myself that we were going to reach England without meeting anything German, that we were protected by English gunboats and submarines and surely nothing could happen to us on such a beautiful day on such a placid sea.”

As she turned to walk across the deck, a German torpedo struck.

“There was a terrific explosion,” The Star reported in 1935. “Turning her eyes quickly toward the sound, (Naish) saw a vast mass of water, mingled with all sorts of broken and splintered things, shoot up far above the deck.”

She and her husband, Belle Naish said, assisted six people in various stages of panic with their life preservers, she said. Soon the rail of the ship sank beneath the water, which crept up the slanting deck.

“The ship was listing badly,” Belle Naish recalled.

“The deck was so steep we could not stand on it without clinging to something. We clung to the rail of a lifeboat, each with one hand and our other hands were clasped together. My fingers were interlaced in his.”

A second blast then rocked the ship.

“That explosion threw the deck on which we stood upwards and I was shot into the air.… I don’t know how far up I was catapulted nor how I struck the water. When I recovered consciousness I was far beneath the water. I knew that because the light rays coming down through the water were very long.”

She surfaced alongside an overturned lifeboat. Another survivor pulled her up upon it. Later, crew members of a trawler rescued them.

For several days, Belle Naish stayed in Queenstown, Ireland, searching hospitals and morgues for any word of her husband. He was was one of the 1,198 passengers — 128 Americans among them — who died.

Belle Naish returned to Kansas City in June.

She kept the property in Kansas, supported in part by an annuity given her by Theodate Pope, a Connecticut architect and Lusitania passenger fished from the sea by trawler crew members. While many thought Pope dead, Belle Naish insisted she be given medical attention and soon Pope revived.

In 1924 an international tribunal considering payments by Germany considered the following testimony: “The record clearly establishes the facts that (Theodore) Naish was physically strong and mentally alert and that he and his wife were very congenial and in a modest way led an unusually wholesome life. They were accustomed to take together long walks into the country, and it is abundantly proven that after walking 10 or so miles neither showed fatigue.”

The tribunal ordered Germany to pay Belle Naish $12,500 plus $780 for the loss of her husband and belongings.

In 1927 Belle Naish deeded 90 acres of her property to Boy Scouts.

The first organized camp activities occurred the next year. During the Depression years the price for a week at Camp Naish was $7, or $5 if Scouts brought their own provisions.

Ultimately Belle Naish would donate about 180 acres. In the early 1950s scouting officials acquired 640 more acres.

Theodore Naish’s body never was recovered, and in 1941 Scouts helped dedicate the Edwardsville cemetery memorial to him.

That was the first stop on Sunday morning.

An accurate hike

The second stop, after the gravesite ceremony, was an old camp road.

Weaver and other adult leaders led about 60 Boy Scouts down its sometimes steep grade to a small clearing.

There the sounds of the birds drowned out the occasional roar of a truck on a nearby highway.

This, Weaver said, was close to the old flag-stop, where an interuban railroad from Kansas City would halt and let out those Scouts attending early sessions at Camp Naish, before the road was built.

“Now,” Weaver said, “we are going to re-enact the climb back up the hill that the first Scouts would make, before the road was here.

“Of course, we’re not doing it like they were, with all of their gear.”

Today at Camp Naish, the past often stands adjacent to the present.

Some older structures, like an administration building built by the Works Progress Administration, remains amid recent upgrades. A fundraising campaign for the Heart of America Council, which operates both Camp Naish and the H. Roe Bartle Scout Reservation in Osceola, Mo., raised about $17 million in the early 2000s. About $7 million of that was invested at Camp Naish helping to finance, among other improvements, a new swimming pool with zero-depth entry for handicapped swimmers.

This summer more than 7,300 Scouts and adult leaders will attend sessions at Camp Naish, working on as many as 50 merit badges ranging from fire safety to filmmaking.

More than 8,600 Scouts and adults, meanwhile, will attend sessions at the Bartle Reservation in Osceola.

“I think it’s unbelievable that Mrs. Naish donated this camp to us for the permanent use of the Boy Scouts,” said Gabe Stilwell of Odessa, Mo. “This offers us a way to pretty much get out. We love camping an this is a great place to camp.”

“It’s an amazing story,” said Joseph Ward of Overland Park, referring to the Lusitania sinking. “It was once-in-a-lifetime chance that all that would happen and, because of that, we have this camp.”

Sunday’s hike ended at the top of a nearby hill, where a small fragment of rock foundation — the one remaining remnant of the old Naish cabin — stood surrounded by black wrought iron.

“It’s pretty easy to see why Theodore Naish would fall in love with these bluffs,” Weaver told the Scouts. “On this land, we are just part of a long line of Scouts.”

This story was originally published May 31, 2015 at 10:09 PM with the headline "The Lusitania connection still echoes for area Boy Scouts at Camp Naish."