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Pasto Agricultural Museum to host Forestry Merit Badge workshop

The Pasto Agricultural Museum, located in Pennsylvania Furnace near the University Park campus, boasts a collection of unique items that captures thousands of years of agricultural history and development. Credit: Pat Mansell / Penn StateCreative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s Pasto Agricultural Museum will be the site of June 8 programming aimed at helping Boy Scouts earn a Forestry Merit Badge. The event is being held during the 2019 Pennsylvania Timber Show.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for scouts to earn requirements for a badge while also learning the history of agriculture and the forest-products industry in Pennsylvania,” said Rita Graef, curator of the museum, an outreach of the College of Agricultural Sciences. She added that various activities related to earning the badge, including two forestry tours, will take place between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.

In working through the forestry merit badge requirements, scouts will explore the complexity of a forest while identifying many species of trees and plants and their roles in a forest's life cycle. They also will learn about some of the resources that forests provide to humans and discover how people play a large part in sustaining the health of forests.

A merit badge counselor will be on site that day to approve scouts’ completion of tasks. For further details on the recommended prerequisites and what can be done at the museum and show, visit the event link on the Pasto website.

In addition, the museum will host a guest appearance by the Axe Whisperer on Friday and Saturday, June 7-8. He will share tales of early Pennsylvania woodsmen, as told to him by the historic axes in his collection.

More information on the museum and its open houses is available at the website. To receive information and event reminders via email, send a message to PastoAgMuseum@psu.edu. Graef can be reached at 814-863-1383 or by email at rsg7@psu.edu.

Located on the Ag Progress Days site at the Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center at Rock Springs — 15 minutes southwest of State College on Route 45 — the museum features hundreds of rare farm and home implements from the “muscle-power era,” before the advent of electricity and gasoline-powered engines.

Last Updated May 31, 2019

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