Eagle Scouts who earn all the merit badges are rarities

Hats off to Eagle Scout Briar McLellan of Raleigh, N.C., who earned all 138 Boy Scout merit badges. The story broke in Raleigh’s News & Observer newspaper in early March.

The Millbrook High School senior plans to enroll in the fall at Marion (Ala.) Military Institute, a renowned junior college.

 

Briar McLellan and his parents, Ken and Kim, celebrate his merit badge achievement. 

His merit badge accomplishment is “next to impossible.” Many have tried, but in more than a century, only 542 Eagle Scouts have “run the table” to earn all of Scouting’s merit badges.

 

Scouting came from England to America in 1910. While visiting London in 1909, William D. Boyce, a Chicago publisher, had become lost in a dense fog. He “was rescued and guided to his destination” by a young British scout. 

The lad trained under British Army Lt. Gen. Robert Baden Powell at his camp for boys that opened in 1907 on Brownsea Island on the southern coast of England. 

When he got back to the United States, Boyce formed the Boy Scouts of America. 

The merit badge program began in 1911, and the first Eagle Scout to earn them all (57 badges at the time) was 18-year-old Stephen H. Porter of Fayetteville, N.Y. (near Syracuse), who accomplished the deed in 1914…mostly. 

In a page 1 story, the Fayetteville Bulletin reported on July 17, 1914, that “Scout Porter has qualified for 56 of the 57 merit badges offered by the National Court of Honor. The merit badge for ‘invention’ is the only one that he has not earned, and he is now working on three inventions, with one of which he hopes to win the last badge.” 

“But the fact that Scout Porter has won 35 more badges than were necessary for his election (to the rank of Eagle Scout) places him in a class entirely alone. His record has not been equaled among Boy Scouts anywhere.” 

The merit badges that Porter earned were for: Agriculture, angling, archery, architecture, art, astronomy, athletics, automobiling, aviation, bee farming, blacksmithing, bugling, business, camping, carpentry, chemistry, civics, conservation, cooking, craftsmanship, cycling, dairying, electricity, firemanship, first aid, first aid to animals, forestry, gardening, handicraft and horsemanship. 

Others he received were for: Interpreting, leather working, life saving, machinery, marksmanship, masonry, mining, music, ornithology, painting, pathfinding, personal health, photography, pioneering, plumbing, poultry farming, printing, public health, scholarship, sculpture, seamanship, signaling, stalking (animal tracking), surveying, swimming and taxidermy. 

David L. Eby of La Salle, Mich., a Scouting historian, said he learned in 2015, that Stephen Porter’s entire collection of Scouting awards was still intact and is being preserved as a valued family treasure. 

The collection includes “the most famous merit badge, Porter’s ‘invention’ merit badge,” Eby said. “The last merit badge Stephen needed in order to have them all was there.”

 

The ‘invention’ merit badge was discontinued in 1914, but Eby feels certain that Porter received “an extension” to complete the requirements in 1915. Scouting archives show that one final “invention” badge was issued in 1915. 

“What Stephen Porter invented has still not been determined,” Eby said. “We do know that Porter once taught electricity as a vocational education instructor.” 

The first female Eagle Scout to earn all the merit badges was Hannah Holmes of Celebration, Fla., in 2019. She was 14 at the time. Hannah earned an associate’s degree at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., and is now a film director in Orlando, Fla.

 

Hannah Holmes

The second female to perform the feat was Isabella Tunney of St. Paul, Minn., in 2020, at age 16. She attends the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in business administration.

Isabella Tunney