Lincoln Ellsworth - Honors

Honors

In 1927, the Boy Scouts of America made Ellsworth an Honorary Scout, a new category of Scout created that same year. This distinction was given to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...". The other eighteen men who were awarded this distinction were: Roy Chapman Andrews; Robert Bartlett; Frederick Russell Burnham; Richard E. Byrd; George Kruck Cherrie; James L. Clark; Merian C. Cooper; Louis Agassiz Fuertes; George Bird Grinnell; Charles A. Lindbergh; Donald Baxter MacMillan; Clifford H. Pope; George Palmer Putnam; Kermit Roosevelt; Carl Rungius; Stewart Edward White; Orville Wright. The Boy Scout's Book of True Adventure, Fourteen Honorary Scouts, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in New York in 1931 includes an essay "The First Crossing of the Polar Sea" by Lincoln Ellsworth. The United States Postal Service once produced a stamp with his picture. To this day, the high school teams in Hudson, Ohio, are named "The Explorers" after Ellsworth.

In 1928, Ellsworth was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal that honored both his 1925 and 1926 polar flights. Eight years later in 1936 he was awarded a second medal, for "his claims on behalf of the United States of approximately 350,000 square miles in Antarctica and for his 2,500-mile aerial survey of the heart of Antarctica." He thus became one of only four people to be awarded two Congressional Gold Medals.

The Antarctic base Ellsworth Station was named after him.