ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, Va. — Anne McClung was tending horses in her 19th-century barn one day last summer when she noticed a change in the Maury River flowing swiftly nearby. She’s known the river all her 76 years, but it didn’t take a practiced eye to recognize clouds of silt in the normally clear waters.
McClung could think of only one cause:
The Boy Scouts.
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The National Capital Area Council of the Scouts, based in Bethesda, has maintained a campground and lake a few miles upstream from McClung’s home for almost six decades. In recent times, the Scouts have drained the lake every fall, causing sediment to pour into one of Virginia’s most iconic and well-loved rivers.
Last year, the Scouts drained the lake in August at peak season for the Maury, driving anglers, kayakers and swimmers out of the water. Resentment among local residents boiled over. Now they’ve organized an effort to fight back against what they see as mounting damage to a precious local resource. But with little legal authority and conflicting governmental mandates, the Maury River Alliance is struggling to make a difference.
“We have to do something. We can’t let it go unaddressed, unchallenged,” said alliance member George Kosovic, 73, whose family has long owned property along the river.
The situation has created an unusual standoff between local residents and an organization known for honor and stewardship, though plagued in recent years by controversy and financial trouble, leading to a decision last week to rebrand as Scouting America. The Boy Scouts have taught generations of young people how to enjoy and care for the outdoors in these mountains, but letters to local newspapers regularly cast the D.C. group as out-of-town villains.
“The Maury is a mighty river that is being held back and spoiled for generations to come and only done so to benefit one group of summer visitors,” one letter to the Lexington News-Gazette read in August. “The Scouting organization is failing citizens,” another said earlier this year.
Matthew Keck, director of support services for the National Capital Area Council of the Boy Scouts, said in an interview that the Scouts are doing everything they can to maintain their property and care for the environment.
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“We’re looking to model what it is we teach young people, right?” Keck said, then recited what’s known as Scout Law: “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. We don’t just say those words to open a meeting, we live by them. We are always trying to be good Scouts.”
The Scouts, he said, are stuck in a Catch-22: If the dam that created their lake were to fail, it could destroy the lives and property of thousands of people downstream. But maintaining it requires periodically lowering the lake, which harms the water quality of the river.
“It’s a tough thing all the way around,” said Rockbridge County administrator Spencer Suter, who has lived in the county nearly 30 years and is trying to work with both sides of the contentious issue. “From my perspective, from the county perspective, we just want the Maury to be the Maury. … [But] there’s a lot of moving parts.”
From just below the Goshen Scout Reservation, the Maury flows 43 miles through the mountains of Rockbridge County and the city of Lexington before emptying into the James River. It’s Virginia’s only river that starts and ends within a single county.
“Call it a spine. Call it a lifeblood flow,” Kosovic said.
Shawnee and Cherokee people lived along the waterway before European settlers made it the western frontier. Before the Civil War, small pig-iron foundries dotted the mountains and shipped their goods on flat-bottomed bateaux along a canal that bypassed the river’s many rocky falls. Giant stone locks, abandoned when the railroad arrived, loom now like castle ruins beside the popular Ben Salem swimming hole.
The Maury tumbles out of the Allegheny Mountains through the Goshen Pass, a gap that looks like interlocking puzzle pieces and produces what the conservation group American Whitewater calls “probably the most ‘Classic’ of Virginia’s whitewater streams.”
In 1954, Virginia made the Goshen Pass Natural Area Preserve the state’s first wildlife management area. Its chestnut oak forests shelter the Appalachian jewelwing, a rare damselfly, along with bears, bobcats, water snakes and bald eagles. The state stocks the river with trout. Recently, the General Assembly named the Maury a “state scenic river.”
“That designation is a tourist attraction point, but apparently it has no teeth in terms of stopping the Scouts from doing this,” said Sam Calhoun, a retired law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington who owns a cottage on the Maury. “Obviously, there’s an irony there.”
Drawn to the wild beauty just three hours southwest of D.C., the National Capital Area Council of the Scouts bought about 4,000 acres in the Goshen area in 1960 and created a District-flavored outpost. The 444-acre lake, formed in 1966 by damming a Maury tributary called the Little Calfpasture, is named Lake Merriweather for Scout donor and D.C. philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post. One of the reservation’s five camps is named after the Bethesda-based Marriott Corp., another donor. The road that rings the reservation is Beltway Drive.
Every summer, the camps host wilderness and merit badge programs for thousands of Scouts from the council’s membership area, which includes the District, suburban Maryland, Northern Virginia, Fredericksburg and — through a council merger — the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“We have weekly programs of aquatics activities, ecology training, team building, climbing activities,” Keck said. “The lake — it is the central feature, both for program delivery and for the landscape. It’s the space between the campsites, which makes it feel more personal.”
From May through the beginning of August, about 200 Scout staffers operate the reservation. The rest of the year, only two people are there full time.
The lake is less than a mile above the spot where the Little Calfpasture and the Calfpasture converge to form the Maury. In 1985, a storm caused catastrophic floods that wiped out a section of Route 39 along the river that took a year to rebuild. But the current spate of problems dates to 1992, according to a timeline provided by the state Department of Environmental Quality.
That year, a fish kill on the short stretch of the Little Calfpasture below the lake was attributed to the Scouts’ releasing water through a drain at the bottom of the dam, sending a massive slug of sediment downstream. The state issued a notice of violation and required the Scouts to make changes to the dam and its management.
The Little Calfpasture was still “severely impaired” several years later, so the state ordered the Scouts to keep the lake full except during times of emergency. In 2004, the Scouts started lowering the lake again every fall; the state stepped in and told them to stop. Back and forth it went, with varying levels of compliance, until 2014, when the state decided the Little Calfpasture was gradually improving and lifted its sanctions.
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Later that same year, county conservation officers began complaining that the problems had started again. But because the sanctions were lifted, the state had no authority to enforce change. Every fall, the Scouts would drain the lake and sediment would flow into the Maury. By 2023, a study by a scientist at James Madison University found that the Little Calfpasture is so choked with silt that little can live there, placing it in the bottom 15 percent of waterways statewide — worse than some urban streams.
Residents say the silt also degrades the Maury over time. John Pancake, 76, spent his whole life visiting the spot in the Goshen Pass where his home now stands. What used to be a clean stretch of boulders and water, charted by his grandmother 100 years ago, is now narrowed by earth and vegetation, with sycamores growing to the water’s edge.
The murkiness is often visible through the city of Lexington and miles beyond, residents say. But because that’s usually during the winter months, it has less direct impact on Maury life. That changed last year, when the early drawdown caught everyone off guard.
Keck said the Scouts drained the lake in August to prepare for dredging under a federal grant. But once the lake was down and mud flats exposed, the Scouts couldn’t get approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to dump the dredging spoils because the designated deposit area was home to an endangered bat, he said. So the mud flat sat for weeks, washing into the Maury.
Like any dammed body of water, the lake traps sediment — from fine silt to “tires or cows or trees. At some point we have to clean all of that out,” Keck said. That’s the primary reason they lower the lake every year. In addition, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), which oversees dam safety, wants the Scouts to ensure that an emergency gate at the base of the dam is operable so water can be released in a storm or flood.
The dam is 38 feet high and mostly earthen, with a concrete channel in the center featuring 10 gates that can be opened or closed, plus the emergency gate below like the drain in a bathtub. Maintaining the emergency gate means opening it every year, which releases fine silt downstream, Keck said.
In a statement to The Washington Post, a spokesman for the DCR said the “gate tests are brief and will not lead to any significant drawdown of a reservoir.”
The state’s Department of Environmental Quality would like that gate kept closed at all times and the lake to remain full. “All the data show that if it’s kept at full pool you see much less sediment downstream. That’s best for the river. But if you have to draw it down, minimize the time and depth,” said Nesha McRae of the department’s Valley Regional Office in Harrisonburg, who has spent years working on the river.
But the state’s authority to enforce water quality is limited. Unlike the fish kill of 1992, there is no single catastrophic event to penalize. And because the sediment coming into the lake is considered “non point source,” or originating from a general environment instead of a single polluter, the best the state can do is order a “total maximum daily load” report, or a voluntary action plan to reduce overall runoff.
Such a plan went into effect in 2017. Suter, the county administrator, has been trying to help coordinate efforts to meet its goals. Federal grants have helped farmers fence grazing lands upstream on the Calfpasture, reducing runoff. Cadets from Virginia Military Institute in Lexington cleared out a ravine that had been used as an unofficial trash dump.
On the Scout reservation, though, little has changed.
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“We’re at the phase where we’re trying to understand, would larger-scale dredging help us to manage the silt and sediment that’s in the lake over time?” said Keck, an Eagle Scout from McLean who grew up going to camp at Goshen.
Residents say they’re frustrated and don’t understand what the Scouts have in mind. Last month, at least 150 people turned up for an informational meeting with the Maury River Alliance at a local fire station. Members had hoped state lawmakers would attend, but all had to be in Richmond for a General Assembly session. Residents vowed to keep pressure on the state to broker some kind of deal so the lake can be managed in a way that minimizes harm to the Maury and keeps locals informed.
McClung, a former librarian who has written books about Rockbridge County and the Goshen Pass, said she and others feel strongly because the river is woven into their lives. “Many children have been conceived on this river,” she said. Babies are baptized there. Weddings take place on the banks. Families scatter the ashes of loved ones.
Pancake, who retired in 2008 as the arts editor of The Post, has written about the river’s role through five generations of his family’s history. On his wall are photos from across the years — Pancake as a child in 1955 with his father in the river; at the same spot in 1980 with his daughter, Bess; and Bess in 2015 with her young daughter.
Now, as another summer approaches, Lake Merriweather is nearly full and the Scouts are preparing for family camping events on Memorial Day weekend. And on a recent visit to a suspended footbridge just below the confluence of the Maury, the lingering effects of lake runoff are still visible.
The Little Calfpasture on the right comes in brownish and cloudy; the Calfpasture on the left is clear; and the Maury looks like two rivers zipped together.
“People are really galvanized, more in the last six months than I’ve seen in 20 years I’ve been working on this,” said Sandra Stuart, 84, a former court reporter who trained herself to monitor the Maury’s water quality. “We like it here. We want our river.”
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