• Search this entire site for keywords.
• Find what's new at this site. See a list of pages here which were most recently modified.
• Recommend this site to a friend.
• Send feedback to the webmaster and site developer, Glenn Chase.
• Take a quick Site Survey.

Please take a moment to try each of these out (especially the site survey!) and let me know what you think from the new feedback page! Still to come - the voting booth I promised yesterday.

Here's an incentive to take the survey - when you have completed it and submitted your answers you can see how other people have responded - all answers are anonymous, of course.

Next project is building a page to list all of the Peninsula Council Camp patches that Sam sent me. Look for scans of patches from long gone camps like Okee, Washington, and James River, as well as good old Camp Chickahominy.

I have almost completed the site forms page which will allow you to search the site by keywords, view a page with links to the most recently modified pages, recommend the site to a friend, and provide feedback directly to me without having to open your email application. I am also working on a voting booth where you can cast your vote for your favorite Lodge 463 patch!

Last, but not least, I would really appreciate your taking a moment to complete this Site Survey to help me get a better idea of how to improve this web site to meet your needs and expectations.

Received more scans via email from Tim Streagle, including the X4 and X8 Honor Member patches, as well as two 463 activity patches ('79 Winter Ordeal and '80 Summer Ordeal)- all are now available on this site.

Projects currently underway to improve this site include:

• Add search engine
• Add a button to suggest/recommend this site to a friend who might be interested
• Add a form to submit feedback/information to me directly
• Add a button to check which pages have been modified most recently

Still looking for several items - please email if you can help out!

• Photograph of former Kecoughtan Lodge Advisor E. Bailey Tudder
• Patch scans for most Chanco Lodge issues (and some Kecoughtan Lodge issues also)
• Information and a scan of the reported Wahunsenakah Lodge 333 Honor Flap

I finally got a chance to review the Area III-C book which Sam Fairchild so generously loaned to me. This pamphlet is titled "Area III-C Order of the Arrow W.W.W. Manual of Lodges" and was published in 1963 "as a service to the Area by Koo Koo Ku Hoo Lodge 161, Donald Cox, Lodge Chief, Tony Tucker, Editor." Price: 25 cents. What a great reference. It appears each Lodge was asked to submit a page of information and along with pictures of corresponding flaps this booklet was compiled. Rather than excerpt the information I plan to post the contents as GIF images of each page online here so that you can get appreciate the appearance and see how this information was painstakingly typed and photocopied. Look for this to appear within the next few days.

Last but not least - Sam also contributed a photograph of Dr. Ronald Godby, one of the two gentleman for whom this web site is dedicated. I am still in need of a photograph of Bailey Tudder, for the Site Dedication page so if you can help out please email me.

Former Kecoughtan Lodge Chief Sam Fairchild has sent an Area III-C history booklet I will review to see if there is relevant information I can add to this site.

I began a Site Dedication page with a nice biography of Bailey Tudder submitted by Sam Fairchild. Still waiting for a picture of Bailey and a bio and pic of Ron Godby. I also found an old black and white picture of a Kecoughtan tap out ceremony from the early 70's I plan to scan and add to the Lodge history page as soon as I find some time.

Back in July I submitted a nomination for this site to be evaluated for the Lord Baden Powell Award for Excellence on the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, it appears this award may no longer be available since the person who was administering web site reviews has not responded to my requests. If anyone has any information on this topic, please let me know.

1. Who designed the original Kecoughtan Lodge flap (S1a)?

2. There reportedly was pressure from the National BSA Office for the Lodge to remove the Confederate flags from the flap design. The flags were removed beginning with the S13 flap which was issued in 1989. Can anyone provide any background on the decision to change the flap design?

3. The final Kecoughtan Lodge flap (S38) pictures a fallen oak leaf and several acorns with the only the name "Kecoughtan" and "1951-1996" as text. Although this is cataloged in both of the major collecting guides as an "Anniversary" issue, the design appears to be a "Death Flap" to me (last issue of the lodge before merger). When this patch was designed was the future end of the lodge already known or anticipated?

If you have any knowledge on the topics above, please email me - your knowledge can help many others! I will be happy to provide complete confidentiality if you want to share your knowledge anonymously.

I finally split the Area/Section page into four different pages (Area III-C, Section SE-1, Section SE-8, Section SR-7/7A) to speed loading time, with the Area/Section page now becoming an index to Area and Conclave issues. Of course this required changing the site index on all of the other pages ...

Still looking for more information about the reported Wahunsenakah Lodge 333 "Honor Flap." Jeremy Miles of Nawakwa 3 advised that he believes only about 40 have been issued, and that the patch features two wood ducks and has a silver mylar border.

My checklist for Chanco Lodge includes only flap, round, jacket, and "X" (other shape) patches, along with the mysterious chenille prototype/sample listed in the Blue Book 98 Edition but not mentioned at all in Arapaho 2000. Can anyone provide more details about this item? I also still need a checklist of 483 Activity patches ...

A Scouter from Colonial Virginia Council sent me an email back on 14 August advising that my Colonial Virginia Council emblems page was "missing at least 5 issues," but didn't specify what those are. Can anyone help me get my list complete and accurate?

The same Scouter (who doesn't get online much, which is why I suspect he hasn't responded to my reply asking for details) said that my Lodge 333 Emblems page is missing a new "honor flap." Can anyone provide any information on this?

I've decided to add a page dedicated to Chanco Lodge 483 emblems since they are the Lodge that Kecoughtan merged with in January of 1996. Historically Chanco emblems have always been scarce due to the small size of the lodge, so I will probably need a good deal of help acquiring scans of all the patches! Look for the page to debut soon. I need a checklist of Lodge 483 activity issues - anyone?

In other site news, even though I have never submitted this site for consideration by any search engine, it appears in the top 5 results of many of them when you do a search for "Kecoughtan Lodge." At Fast Search it comes out on top! Try it now and see!

The reason for this is that our hobby primarily uses these two guides for identifying Order of the Arrow insignia, with some collectors preferring the Arapaho guides which have been around much longer than the Blue Book. Other collectors prefer the Blue Book reference guides. To date the only current published price guide for OA insignia is keyed to Arapaho's identification.

The new Arapaho 2000 reference is available as a computer program on CD (unfortunately, it is a Windows only program, but I have been able to run the demo version within VirtualPC from Connectix on my G3 Power Macintosh without any problems). Arapaho 2000 includes an enormous library of scanned images which makes patch identification much easier than trying to correlate text abbreviations for colors of border, lettering, fleur-de-lis, and backgrounds with the piece of cloth you are holding.

In summary, while it would be convenient to have a single point of reference for identifying and valuing Order of the Arrow insignia, we are most fortunate to have two comprehensive and detailed tomes available for our hobby. While their numbering schemes do not always match, the amount of unique information offered by each makes owning them both a necessity for the true OA collector.

Herb is also recruiting assistance from local collectors to help fill in the blanks on this site. It's great to know that the word is spreading so that our collective knowledge can become more accessible.

I've started the process of splitting up the Area/Section page into separate pages to speed load time. You can get a preview here.

The page on Area and Section conclave patches has grown so large I am already planning on splitting it up to separate pages so people with slower modem connections don't have to wait so long for it to load.

Theresa Williams of Heart of Texas Trader sent a great scan of an SE-8 chenille which is now online. Thanks Theresa!

Current plans are to add counters for each page to see which areas are of the most interest, but I won't tackle this full speed until the URL is finalized. Road Runner tech support tells me the only way to change the name of the directory my files reside in is to download my entire site to a local hard disk, then delete the directory on the server, then create a new one with the new name I want and reupload everything. Not what I would call an ideal user experience...

I am holding off on submitting the site to search engines pending a final determination of the URL for the site. I'm thinking of changing the "elspanko" part to something a little more descriptive for what the site actually contains.

Even if you don't have any of the patches listed that I need scans for you may still be able to help out by providing information to help fill in the blanks. For example, can you tell me which camp that the conclaves were held at? Can you provide dates of conclaves and Pow-Wows? I don't even know who hosted the Pow Wows or Conclaves for several years in the 50's and 60's and even as recently as 1994 and 1995. I have a patch for 1994, but there is no indication which of the lodges was the host!

Jimmy sent along scans of the 463 Vigil issues (s11 and s12) and the 1992 NOAC delegate flap (s32), as well as a scan of the 463 s1 flap, which unfortunately has a threadbreak. I can't decide if I want to use a scan of that patch on the site or the scan offered by John Pannell and Rusty Reeves which is already pictured on the Internet Guide to OA Insignia web site. Jimmy also sent along a scan of the 1999 SR-7A Conclave flap from Lodge 333.

Arvid filled up my mailbox with scans of Area III-C Pow Wow patches from 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1969, plus SE-1 conclave patches from 1975 and 1980, SE-8 conclave issues from 1983, 1984, and 1985, and finally SR-7A patches from 1998 and 1999.

I've placed most of the Pow Wow and Conclave images online after optimizing them for the web and hope to have all of the remaining conclave and flap images available before the weekend is over.

A big "Thanks!" to Jimmy and Arvid for pitching in and helping make this site even better with their timely and considerate contributions.

The AltaVista link is actually to an early incarnation of these pages which resided on AOL. As you can guess, the 463 Emblems site quickly outgrew AOL drive space limitations and had to be moved. I've built redirects from the former AOL pages to send people to the new location automatically after a brief message to update bookmarks. A cool feature of AltaVista is the ability to view these (or any) web pages translated from English to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish.

I am deeply indebted to the late Dr. Ron Godby of Yorktown, VA for his authoritative compilation of Order of the Arrow Lodge issues for the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. Dr. Godby's research was the basis for the Kecoughtan Lodge 463 listings in the first edition of the Blue Book Standard Order of the Arrow Insignia Catalog, published in 1996. This site is dedicated to Dr. Godby and the late E. Bailey Tudder, longtime Lodge Advisor for Kecoughtan 463 whose dedication to cheerful service was exceeded by no one.

On the Site Credits page I have tried to list the names of people who have been instrumental in helping me in my effort to provide an online reference of the history of Kecoughtan Lodge and every emblem that it issued. If you helped out and aren't mentioned, please forgive my accidental omission and tell me so that I can correct it.