[Broadside]: Repeated! The First Fire Maker. Camp Fire Girls' Festival. Thetford, Vt. Saturday, August 10 at 3 O'Clock

Thetford, Vermont: The Vermonter Press, 1912. Unbound. Good. Large broadside. Measuring 12" x 19". Printed in red on thin paper. Small chips and some dampstains mostly in the lower right-hand corner, good or better. A poster from the earliest days of the Campfire Girls. The group was started in Thetford, Vermont in 1910, but wasn't formally organized until 1912. According to Wikipedia: "In 1910, young girls in Thetford, Vermont, watched their brothers, friends, and schoolmates - all Boy Scouts - practice their parts in the community's 150th anniversary, which would be celebrated the following summer. The pageant's organizer, William Chauncey Langdon, promised the girls that they, too, would have an organized role in the pageant, although no organization such as Boy Scouts existed then for girls. Langdon consulted with Mrs. Charles Farnsworth, preceptress of Horace Mann School near Thetford, Vermont. Both approached Luther Halsey Gulick, M.D. about creating a national organization for girls. Gulick introduced the idea to friends, among them G. Stanley Hall, Ernest Thompson Seton, and James West, executive secretary of the Boy Scouts. After many discussions and help from Gulick and his wife Charlotte, Langdon named the group of Thetford girls the Camp Fire Girls." Apparently the first Festival was held in 1911, celebrating the discovery of fire, thus the "Repeated!" in the title. Surely one of the earliest separately printed references, and perhaps the first broadside, referring to the group. *OCLC* locates a single copy of a four-page songbook for the 1912 event (Brown University), but no mention of this broadside, or any other publication about the group before 1912.