Scout spruces up Baldwin cabin

The small, red cabin, tucked neatly on a large plot of land on Grove Street in Baldwin, has been home to all things scouting for 77 years. Over that time, though, it hasn’t had many upgrades, including its vast backyard with towering trees spread throughout.

Julian Mendez, a 17-year-old who attended Meadow Elementary School before moving to Bellmore in middle school, has remained a part of Boy Scout Troop 182, which hosts its regular meetings in the Baldwin cabin. For his Eagle Scout project, Mendez, now a senior at John F. Kennedy High School, aimed to enhance the cabin’s backyard aesthetics by removing dead trees and branches from the property, on top of other improvements.

In 1938, the Baldwin Boys Association, which still exists today but now includes women and girls, built the Tom Sheppard Cabin for Boy Scout meetings and functions in Baldwin. Two Boy Scout troops and two Girl Scout troops use the cabin for their regular meetings, including Mendez’s. The property has a large backyard packed with trees as well as a campfire circle, and is the ideal place for boys and girls to learn about nature and earn scouting badges. The BBA struggles to keep the cabin open, though, and survives off donations and fundraisers.

So when Mendez came to Tom Jan, an assistant scout master and an Eagle Scout himself, with the idea of removing dead trees from the property, the main concern was how the group would pay for it. “Julian had a great idea,” Jan, who used to live in Baldwin but moved to Rockville Centre four years ago, said, “but we weren’t sure how we were going to do it.”

Mendez was collecting money to hire a tree service company, but it wasn’t long before Jan put him in touch with Weeping Willow Tree Service based in Oceanside. The company said they’d do the work — free of charge.

So in November, employees from Weeping Willow Tree Service came to Baldwin’s cabin and got to work. After a day-and-a-half there, three fully-grown trees were cut down, in addition to six or seven others being trimmed. “It would have been about $5,000 worth of work,” Jan said.