The 21 Club

"The 21 Club" Is the oldest of the winter cabins in Camp Cachalot, and has served as a home away from home for many summer camp staffers, weekend campers, and even non-Scouting groups over the years—it's even been a stand-in for the Oriental Garden Theater, and once owned its own pair of sunglasses (you just might find the image somewhere in our Image Gallery)!

21 Club

The 21 Club, early 1960s

Photo courtesy Larry Harney

But why is it called "The 21 Club," anyway? There have been a lot of explanations put forth, running the gamut from "it was 21 miles from the Cachalot Council office", to "it sleeps 21 people," to "the first group to sleep in it had 21 people in it, and they all drove a nail into the threshold." None of those is the actual reason, but we'll get to that in a minute.

First things first: the 21 Club wasn't actually built at Camp Cachalot, it was moved to Camp from its original site off of Drift Road in Westport, MA. The original 20'x30' cabin, which is now the "front room" of the building, was built using wood from the (demolished) Potomska Mills by Aubrey Coon, a Scoutmaster from New Bedford. We don't have an exact date for the move, but we do know that the 21 Club was in camp and was being used as an early Trading Post during summer camp of 1948. The evidence is beginning to suggest that the building was actually moved out to camp before the first summer camp operation in 1946.

After being moved to Camp, the back room of the building was added on, and the building existed in much the same condition until the mid-1980's. At that time, the building underwent a major renovation: the current front porch was added, the windows and siding were completely replaced, and the interior walls and ceiling were paneled and insulated. In the early 1990's the fireplace, which had been repaired multiple times, was "deactivated" and the flue reused for the stove that currently heats the front room.

And the origin of the name? That's actually an easy one—Aubrey Coon was the Scoutmaster of Troop 21 in New Bedford. It was originally their cabin, and they're the ones who moved it from Westport to Cachalot, with the assistance of members of the camp staff.

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