Highville, A Girl Scout and Prohibition Story

by H. P. Northrop

1930

"Sample" book, 15 cents

This is the story of Henry Freeman, a mechanical draftsman working for the government in New York City in 1927.  He is proud of his Puritan heritage and the fact that he never drinks alcohol. He walks away from the "rat-race" and returns to his home town of Homeville to start fresh, only to discover that Homeville has been overrun by people who drink alcohol. He buys some land in the nearby hills, and starts his own community of non-drinkers by renting out the farmland to those farmers he approved of. He sets aside a large plot of land to create a Girl Scout camp. Both the community of farmers, called Highville, and the Girl Scout camp are a success. 

The story of the Girl Scout camp is fairly vague and more of a backdrop to the anti-drinking story. The camp is large enough to handle 1,000 girls over the summer, and they live off the fresh eggs and crops grown on the property. Henry builds 3 cottages for the campers. The second floor of each cottage is big enough to hold 40 girls each in their own tiny room! At one point the girls in the camp find and adopt 2 bear cubs and they leash them to take them on hikes. At the end of that summer, the girls simply let the bears go free when the girls go home.