A mother's grief built one of the most important training grounds in American scouting history. When Mortimer L. Schiff died in 1931 while serving as president of the Boy Scouts of America, his mother, Mrs. Jacob Schiff, purchased 400 acres near Mendham, New Jersey, and donated them to the organization her son had led. The Mortimer L. Schiff Scout Reservation opened the following year and was formally dedicated on October 18, 1933. For the next forty-seven years, this patch of northern New Jersey woodland would shape generations of scout leaders and define how the BSA trained its own.
The reservation's significance extends beyond sentiment. Schiff became the BSA's National Training Center, and it was here that the first Wood Badge courses in the United States were held. Wood Badge, originally created by Robert Baden-Powell in 1919 to train adult scout leaders, crossed the Atlantic to Schiff's wooded acreage and became a cornerstone of American scouting education. The program taught patrol method, outdoor skills, and leadership -- principles that leaders carried back to thousands of local troops across the country. Schiff was the place where American scouting professionalized its leadership pipeline, and its influence rippled outward for decades.
Among the most colorful figures to walk Schiff's trails was William "Green Bar Bill" Hillcourt, a Danish-born scouter who became perhaps the most influential voice in American scouting pedagogy. Hillcourt served as scoutmaster of a special troop based at the reservation -- not just any troop, but one that functioned as a living laboratory. Here, Hillcourt tested new ideas about outdoor education, patrol leadership, and campcraft before publishing them in Boys' Life magazine and the 1948 Boy Scout Fieldbook. The photographs that illustrated those publications were often shot on Schiff's grounds, meaning the visual identity of mid-century American scouting was, in large part, composed among these particular trees and meadows. Hillcourt is buried in Mendham, near the land where he did his most consequential work.
In 1979, the BSA's National Council relocated its headquarters from New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Irving, Texas. The National Training Center followed, moving to the vast Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. Schiff's purpose evaporated almost overnight. The reservation closed, and with it ended an era when the intellectual center of American scouting sat in the hills of Morris County. When the camp shuttered, Nassau County Council's Camp Wauwepex in Wading River, New York, was renamed the John M. Schiff Scout Reservation in honor of Mortimer's son, John, who had followed his father into scouting leadership as a World Scout Committee member.
Today, more than 310 acres of the original reservation survive as the Schiff Nature Preserve, administered within the Patriots' Path Council. The cabins and training halls are gone, but the landscape that shaped American scouting education endures as open parkland. Trails wind through hardwood forest and meadow where scout leaders once practiced the skills they would teach to millions of young Americans. The preserve sits quietly in a part of New Jersey that has grown suburban around it, a pocket of woodland whose history exceeds its modest signage. For those who know what happened here -- the first American Wood Badge beads earned, Hillcourt's experimental troop marching through the trees, a grieving mother's gift transformed into a national institution -- the forest carries more than birdsong.
Located at 40.750N, 74.630W near Mendham, New Jersey, in the hills of Morris County. The Schiff Nature Preserve appears as a wooded tract amid suburban development. Look for the green corridor along the ridgeline northwest of Bernardsville. Nearby airports include Morristown Municipal Airport (KMMU, 7 nm NE) and Somerset Airport (KSMQ, 12 nm SW). Best viewed at 2,500-3,500 ft AGL, where the contrast between preserved woodland and surrounding development is most visible.