Thanks for visiting the on-line home of Pack 279 of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.  Pack 279 is very active in our community and has continuously received the Quality Unit, Journey to Excellence Award for numerous years in a row.  Most of our scouts live in neighborhoods within Hampden Township and attend Shaull or Greenridge Elementary schools of the Cumberland Valley School District.  However, Pack 279 welcomes scouts from all around the area.  Our Pack leadership is comprised of extremely dedicated and experienced volunteers in the Scouting program.  The families of Pack 279 are also very active in the numerous events sponsored by the Pack throughout the year.  

The goal of the leaders of Pack 279 is to carry out the mission of the Boy Scouts of America.  We provide an educational program for young men to build desirable qualities of character, to train in the responsibilities of participatory citizenship and to develop personal fitness.  The scouts of Pack 279 learn leadership skills while taking part in many activities and community projects.  

We have a year-long program where our scouts have the opportunity to camp, hike, and cook and have other rewarding outdoor adventures.  Highlights of our pack include going to Boy Scout camps in the area, visiting local parks, hiking on the Appalachian Trail and at Hawk Mountain, racing in the Pinewood Derby, holding the annual Blue and Gold Banquet, going to Hershey Bears and Harrisburg Senators games, and running the annual Raingutter Regatta.

Pack 279 is in the Pioneer District of the New Birth of Freedom Council of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). 

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

President Abraham Lincoln