The highest rank a Boy Scout can hope to achieve is Eagle Scout, and one of the requirements in the long, driven process to obtain said rank is the Eagle Scout Project. An Eagle Scout Project is designed to benefit the scout’s community and develop their leadership, planning, and fundraising.

For senior Acadia Manley’s Eagle Scout project, she is creating an archive of forty-four Abington veterans killed in action for the abingtonma.gov site. She is also working on creating an interactive map to be displayed in the cemetery with a QR code that allows visitors to access information about fifteen servicemen of those forty-four, with the former being buried at the Mt. Vernon Cemetery. The project has been under way for over a year in concept and three months in practice, with an expected completion date of January 2023.

The research Manley has been doing is a show of unity, with a group of students more than willing to help. This has included finding the names of servicemen’s family, occupation(s) previous to service, where they were stationed, their age, what war they fought in, etc. The project was inspired by Aaron Christian, who expressed an interest in using QR codes on graves to track which ones had received flags on Memorial Day. Reverend Kristy Coburn and Adam Gunn, Director of Abington’s Veteran Services, have helped Manley with her project, as the initial research was based on Coburn’s research.

U.S. Navy Veteran Recounts His Service

Honoring an Abington Heroine

Honoring Those We Have Lost

The aim of the project is to educate about local veterans and humanize them in a new way, as well as paying respect to them and the service they’ve done for the town and country. When asked the most fascinating part of the project, Manley writes it “…has been going through old Abington High School Yearbooks. I found lots of interesting things. Especially about Charles H. Bellows Jr., who was very active in his high school community. Included in the yearbook was a short story he had written about the dangers of forest fires, he originally wanted to be an Alaskan Ranger.”

Manley’s Eagle Scout project will continue until, approximately, January 2023, and she is always looking for volunteers. For students at Abington High, she is at the library every Friday during Bridge Block researching the veterans. She is also researching at the Dyer Public Library and online, and can send resources for those interested. Early next year there will be a dinner held to fundraise for the installation of the map, and during the winter she will need help cleaning up the cemetery and installing the monument.

For Manley, this project “…is important to me because it is the culmination of a lot of effort on my part and on may others parts. This is the end of my scouting journey and I am proud that I am able to create something that will bring information to a lot of people. My dad wasn’t able to become an Eagle Scout because of complications with his troop, and I am excited to be able to achieve this rank with his help and the help of countless others.”

To ask more about the project, or for Abington High students wanting to help, Acadia Manley can be reached at @[email protected]