A Moore County youth is among more than 30,000 Boy Scouts from around the nation who have set up camp in Virginia for 10 days for the organization’s centennial anniversary.

The national Boy Scout Jamboree in Fort A.P. Hill began July 26 and runs through Wednesday.

Stephen Stewart, of Pinehurst, is serving as a national hometown news correspondent to The Pilot and will be filing blog reports from the jamboree grounds. Stewart, 15, will be a sophomore at The O’Neal School this fall.

“I am very active in numerous extracurricular activities,” Stewart said in an e-mail. “I am on The O’Neal soccer team, basketball team and the track team.”

Scouting is important to Stewart. He is an active member of Troop 7 in Pinehurst — one of the oldest Scout troops in the state. He started in Scouting as a Tiger Cub when still a first-grader. Currently, he holds the rank of Life Scout and is working on completing the requirements needed to receive his Eagle Scout award.

“I am very excited about this opportunity in that it will commemorate the 100th anniversary of Boy Scouting,” he said. “One of the things that I am looking forward to most is meeting various Scouts from all over the world and ‘trading patches’ with them. I am certain that I will make many new friends that I will have for many years to come.”

Sending reports back to his hometown will be one of Stewart’s duties — his hometown good turn — during his days at the mega-camp.

“While at the national jamboree, I will be serving as one of the national hometown news correspondents,” he says. “This role will allow me to compile stories of my experiences there and bring them back to share with the people from my community via The Pilot. I look forward to sharing my experiences in the near future.”

The Scout correspondents have their own press tent, where facilities are made available to Stewart and others to send reports back to hometown papers.

Jamborees like this one are part of an old tradition. The first American jamboree, originally scheduled for 1935 on the mall in Washington, D.C., had to be postponed because of a polio outbreak. It finally took place in 1937 when 25,000 Scouts camped at the foot of the Washington Monument and around the Tidal Basin.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the Scouts. The outbreak of World War II interrupted jamborees for the second time, and the next one didn’t take place until 1950 at Valley Forge, Pa.

A 1953 jamboree held on the dusty hills of the Irvine Ranch south of Los Angeles had to have a road specially built. That road, Jamboree Boulevard, is now the main street of Irvine, Calif.

Roland Gilliam, of Carthage, and North Carolina artist Bob Timberlake were among nearly 50,000 who attended. Since 1981, all jamborees have been held at its present Virginia site.

On Monday, after boarding the bus for Virginia, Stewart filed his first report by e-mail.

“It is finally here and we are off!” he said. “We left Raleigh at 7 a.m. this morning. I will be joining more than 38,000 Boy Scouts and 3,700 adult leaders in Fort A.P. Hill, Va., later today. Attendees will come from all 50 states and from various countries around the world. Once we arrive, we will set up camp and settle into our ‘home’ for the next 10 days.”

Contact John Chappell at jfchappell@thepilot.com.