Who invented s’mores? Don’t believe the myths—this is the real history

Dorothy Christian Moore knew the rules when she climbed in the dark to the ship’s bridge. “This is strictly forbidden,” she wrote as she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, “and I hadn’t been there two minutes before someone seized me roughly from behind.” She explained to the officer her pursuit of the sunrise, and together they watched the blue horizon split into silver, then blaze to gold—like so many campfires that would define her years in the United States.

She arrived the next morning at the invitation of the Girl Scouts to spend the summer of 1923 sharing her skills. Her stint as a volunteer in an officer’s hospital kitchen during World War I, feeding 150 men a day, had earned her the affectionate nickname “Cookie.” After the war, she continued in public service as a leader in Girl Guides, the first sister organization to Boy Scouts, both created in England.

The overseas appointment proved to be momentous.

Cookie specialized in bringing young women outdoors to learn something of themselves and the natural world. By 1925, she’d published a recipe for a camping dessert, and Girl Scouts across the country reported their experiences with “Somemore,” a sweet sandwich made of graham crackers and half a chocolate bar melted by not one but two toasted marshmallows.

A century later, the flavor combo has become a favorite well beyond the woods. Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., the national organization, has even released several commercial versions, with the latest official Girl Scout S’mores boxed cookies retiring in 2025.

But Cookie’s extraordinary story vanished, along with the truth about her role in creating a treat that now seems both ubiquitous and everlasting.

Campfire Fairy Tales

Myths can move faster than a woodpile in winter, and the internet has amplified an incorrect and incomplete history of s’mores.

According to the most widespread origin story, the three packable, snackable ingredients were first joined as “Some More” in a 1927 book called Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts. The chapter about hiking meals only includes one person: Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows. His characters, Rat and Mole, are quoted in a discussion of what’s stuffed into a wicker picnic basket: “coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater.”

More recently, the recipe in Tramping and Trailing was credited to Loretta Scott Crew. She’s as imaginary as Rat and Mole. “We could not find any mention of her,” says Shannon Browning-Mullis, historian for Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. Other relevant archives contain a total of zero references to this alleged troop leader. A 2012 blog post points to a full-blown fakery, and Wikipedia contributors deleted Crew’s page more than a decade ago.

Yet Crew’s name is still cited today, which speaks to a collective yearning for a creator. How could such a celebrated aspect of American childhoods really have no inventor, no genius to applaud? Fiction filled the void.

Meanwhile, Dorothy Christian “Cookie” Moore, a blue-eyed Brit with an astonishingly appropriate nickname, is real. A panoramic review of historical records—from 1920s newspapers to candy trade magazines to summer camp reports, personal letters, and photographs—reveals a portrait of an intrepid woman who loved nothing so much as cooking a meal outside with people who were awakening to the wonders of the forests, rivers, and mountains.

Guide on a mission

When Cookie sailed into New York harbor in May 1923, she didn’t go far. Hours of immigration lines reminded the 34-year-old “of those interminable ‘margarine and cheese’ queues of the worst war years,” she later told her mother. She even helped translate in French and German for the official interpreter to keep the lines moving. Soon, she was heading north of the city to her assignment at Camp Andree Clark, in the sylvan Hudson River valley. 

Cookie had cultivated her proficiency in camping when she served as captain of a Girl Guide troop in Bexhill-on-Sea, on the southern coast of England, where she lived with her widowed mother and devised her ideology around encouraging independence.

“Does the average camp give much scope for initiative and resourcefulness?” Cookie asked in a letter home. “Do the children learn to use their hands and muscles constructively? And above all does the method develop Leadership and a sense of responsibility? These are the questions the Powers that be are asking themselves. They realise the enormous possibilities of applied Scouting and, hence—my raison d’etre.”

Cookie Moore arrived at a critical moment for the Girl Scouts, when the organization was one of several competing for political support, financial resources, and the loyalties of girls in the United States. In the early 1920s, active membership in Girl Scouts held a distant second place to Camp Fire Girls, who boasted close connections to the fabulously popular Boy Scouts, with a half million boys.

Outdoorsy organizations flourished due to major social changes. Families were moving away from fields and farms and into villages, towns, and cities. The 1920 Census determined that the country was more urban than rural for the first time ever—and children increasingly spent their days indoors at schools rather than working in the fresh air. This shift alarmed some parents and social reformers, says Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, distinguished professor of history at Iowa State University. “There’s this real fear that children are going to be damaged physically, emotionally, mentally, by not having contact with the natural world,” she says. “Scouts allowed children to explore many different activities: sports, hiking, nature, cooking. Opportunity after opportunity.” And unlike school, kids were allowed to choose how they learned about the world.

Scouting boomed for boys, with camping as a centerpiece, but the two girls’ organizations interpreted female abilities quite differently. True to the name, Camp Fire Girls did camp, but the program overall emphasized household roles. One proponent encouraged a fun time with: “Find poetry in washing dishes.” In contrast, Girl Scouts offered a more expansive view of thrills girls might chase, even as they abided by societal expectations for learning household duties.

As Cookie settled in at Camp Andree, the divergent philosophies of the two groups were on display in their monthly magazines where both organizations promoted photography contests. Everygirl published a partial page of general guidance by the national executive of the Camp Fire Girls, a businessman. The American Girl published a two-page spread of technical tricks, critiques of photos, and guidance on how to craft a visual story, all written by Jessie Tarbox Beals, one of the first female photojournalists. A camera “is an instrument of great power and influence if understood and used correctly,” she told her young readers, and even a cheap model, she said, could provide a path to a full-blown career for any Girl Scout.

Similarly, the Girl Scouts were interested in Cookie as an expert in her field. She had often taken her Bexhill troop on two-week excursions with minimal equipment. “When we move away, you would think the fairies had been there—everything is that right.” American youth camps in 1923 were not compatible with such meager infrastructure. They were staged in advance of kids arriving and constructed for “mass camping,” with 100 or more kids concentrated in the main eating and sleeping areas.

“We are using Camp Andree Clark as an ‘out-of-door laboratory’ to try out experiments in camping,” wrote the Girl Scouts national director to other leaders that spring. The grounds were scattered into separate units designed for individual patrols of eight Girl Scouts and two leaders, and Cookie Moore pushed that uncommon model even further. 

Off to Innisfree

Trails connected units at Andree with names such as Fairy Ring and Hillside. After some days of learning directions, Cookie trekked to the top of the hill, far beyond Trail’s End, to a newly built cabin that still smelled of fresh logs and mortar. Gray birches stood as the only neighbors around a structure situated at the edge of the wider forest. A cold spring gurgled with fresh water on the other side of the nearby apple orchard. She named the spot “Innisfree,” after a famous poem by William Butler Yeats. “If you’d emptied your pockets and cudgelled your brains for years,” Cookie wrote, “you couldn’t have evolved a more perfect Troop Headquarters than Innisfree.”

This was the beginning of the “pioneer unit,” the first in any Girl Scouts camp. Innisfree served as the daily hub for embarking on rambles to spot hawk and heron nests, distinguish an ash from an aspen, and nourish a profound appreciation for the landscape. Cookie also taught her patrols the technical skills they needed to earn a Pioneer merit badge.

The girls dug latrines and pitched their own tents. They made maps and blazed trails. They axed saplings to build camp furniture and played games that honed their observational skills. They worked together as a team to solve problems. “They had three hours’ good snore after lunch,” Cookie noted, “so that they might see something of the wonder and beauty of the short summer nights.”

She noticed and disliked the many pans and utensils her scouts carried on overnight hikes. So her campfire cooking lessons focused on one-pot meals, like Irish stew, and dishes that required only a pocketknife and a good stick from the surroundings.

Girls roasted cheese cubes wrapped in bacon—“Angels on Horseback” in Cookie’s imaginative parlance—and skewered kabobs of beef, bacon, and onion. “They should be the most delicious fare imaginable,” Cookie instructed, seasoned with woodsmoke to a soundtrack of crickets.

Cookie Moore enthusiastically accepted a request to return for another summer in 1924. She brought her gentle criticism of American parenting with her. “You think so much for your children and tell them what to do until there is nothing left for them to think out for themselves,” she told a U.S. newspaper reporter that year. “Primitive camping develops their resourcefulness.”

She believed in the instincts of girls—their desire for independence and their innate love of adventures. She also allowed them to fail, with support, because “nobody ever learned efficiency by watching an efficient person.”

Her faith also carried into teaching Girl Scouts leaders. Wealthy and middle-class women competently advised girls on merit badges for Child Nurse or Canner, but traditional lives in households of the era had not prepared most women to nurture girls working toward badges such as Star Gazer, Athlete, or Pioneer. And a lack of troop leaders was the most significant existential threat to the organization’s continued growth. One leader who spent time with Cookie later recalled that training sessions were the “spontaneous blossom” of the Girl Scouts movement because so many women found themselves gaining confidence alongside their girls.

Cookie’s guidance for leaders in primitive camping, applied scouting, and outdoor cooking came to be known as “Innisfree Weeks,” and that’s where a legendary dessert was soon born. 

Birth of the ‘Somemore’

Girl Scouts executives continued to formalize and expand a schedule of training events.  Wisconsin hosted the National Camp-Field-Education Conference for midwestern leaders in late September 1924, and Pennsylvania hosted the version for eastern leaders in early October. Cookie brought her usual mirth and cheer to both gatherings, and a handful of newspaper reports indicate that she shared something unusual.

The local director for Girl Scouts in Buffalo, New York, relayed to her troops her experience at the eastern conference assembling kabobs and “a new dessert called ‘Somemore’ ” at the end of a camp-wide game of tracking and observation. An assistant local director from Rochester, New York, played on the opposing team, a group that trained directly with Cookie. A few weeks later, the Rochester newspaper published a now-familiar recipe under the heading “Yummie Dessert.”

And after leaders from Kalamazoo, Michigan, had returned from the midwestern conference, the local newspaper reported that kabobs “and ‘summore’ have been introduced on the Scout menu and have already become famous.”

Well, not quite.

Her own writings on the subject are silent, but wherever Cookie went, somemores followed. Then, in the cover story for the May 1925 issue of The Girl Scout Leader magazine—mailed free to all captains, commissioners, and local directors—Cookie published a weekend hike plan with one-pot meals and an easy dessert that required no extra kitchen utensils: 

            “Somemore”

            16 graham crackers

            4 Hershey bars

            16 marshmallows

Toast the marshmallows until they are pale brown and “gooey.” Then make a sandwich of the two crackers and half a chocolate bar and put the marshmallow in between. Good!

Perhaps Cookie took inspiration from Mallomars or MoonPies, both invented in the 1910s. They used the same ingredients as a somemore, but the outer layer of chocolate devolved into a melting mess near flames. Cookie had noticed that Americans craved candy, but she could not have predicted her triumph. A troop leader in Virginia who attended a training course deemed them “most tempting.” Graham cracker crumbs tumbled into the grass at a troop leader training in Illinois, where they smushed melted chocolate with crispy marshmallows and exclaimed, “O, Girl, what joy!”

Girl Scouts in western New York wrote about somemores many times during the 1925 summer camps. A rainy night in late July left the girls in Buffalo, New York, sitting on ponchos watching their friends struggle to light a pile of damp wood. “Then it blazed up beautifully,” they wrote, “and we sang and talked and laughed and toasted ‘Some-mores.’” In a review that echoes across generations, they declared the dessert “food for the gods.”

It became the breakout year for somemores, and by the end of 1925, Girl Scouts in at least 22 states—coast to coast, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf—had assembled the trio of ingredients around campfires, office stoves, and electric toasters using everything from wood sticks to steel knitting needles.

From the earliest mentions, Girl Scouts established ownership of their novelty and referred to it as the “Girl Scout dessert” or “a Scout specialty.” Troops also tested other names: “samoas” (now a different Girl Scout cookie), “yummies,” and “toasted marshmallow delights.” As part of a national marketing campaign, a marshmallow manufacturer released a recipe booklet in 1925 that included a “Marshmallow Graham Cracker Sandwich,” a tag as unwieldy as it was literal.

“Somemore” worked because it described the food and the feeling. “Every time you eat one, you always go back for more,” concluded the scribe for Troop 7 in her report to the Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper. Cookie once wrote that she admired Americans for their ability to “scrap, at a moment’s notice, lately cherished schemes, in favour of new ones which seem better.” The girls proved her right.

In late 1925, a Minnesota troop called the dessert s’mores—if not the first, definitely one of the earliest examples of the modern apostrophe (and long before internet claims of the word’s creation in a 1938 guidebook written by a man). A century on, s’mores have become a milestone of American childhood and the embodiment of camping. 

Cookie’s cookie

“Already this ‘Innisfree’ idea is spreading about the country,” reported the Girl Scouts national director of the camp department in 1925, and she acknowledged that more American girls were “learning how to be real campers, not merely the ‘summer resort’ kind who do not know how to fend for themselves outdoors.”

Cookie Moore’s hometown newspaper in Bexhill, England, published a letter from her rejoicing that the 1925 camping season had broken records. “So you see, guiding or scouting, it’s all the same the world over. The most use and the best fun of all the strange things we spend our lives attempting to do.”

She continued to teach at camps in Boston and then Chicago, where in 1927, as Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts was published, a newspaper reported that, “The name of Christian Moore is a household word for Girl Scouts everywhere.” The national headquarters estimated that 50,000 girls would participate in pioneer camping that year.

Together with other efforts to develop a generation of leaders, such as including training courses at colleges, Cookie’s work had changed the Girl Scouts’ trajectory of growth. S’mores were a bonus, a sugary tactic in her much broader strategy of inspiring joy out under the open skies.

And yet her story is a study of legacies and what little we control of how the world remembers us.

She headed back to England in December 1928 to rejoin her Girl Guides. Camp Fire Girls tried to rebrand her signature dessert as “heavenly crisps,” yet in 1934, even their official manual conceded a final parenthetical: “(also known as s’mores).” By that point, Girl Scouts counted 350,000 active members, nearly double their former rival.

Unsurprisingly, Cookie opened her own cooking school in 1936. Decades later, she would have read about the 50th anniversary of Girl Scouts, when the organization merged its campfire goody with its even longer history of selling cookies. New in 1962: Some-Mores, a vanilla wafer and marshmallow covered with chocolate.

But no mention of the woman who popularized them. The truth behind the treat had vanished like one of Cookie’s overnight campsites.

Perhaps this anonymity was intentional. Her book of letters was published in 1924 without her name credited. Hail, Girl Scouts! only listed “a Girl Guide” on the cover, and her views on service reflected a similar mindset. “No one is indispensable,” she wrote in 1927. “This should be the motto of every Girl Scout Leader. Once she has realized this, she begins automatically to train others to take her place.”

Cookie Moore lived the rest of her life in Bexhill’s seaside tranquility and never had children. She eventually moved to a retirement home. She meandered into the gardens there, a few months short of her 96th birthday, and died suddenly—in the wilds, as always.

Considering her American escapades of the early 1920s, Cookie once wrote, “I’d give a good deal to be allowed to return and see this wonderful country, say in a hundred years’ time.” If she were to visit this weekend, she wouldn’t recognize much. Innisfree’s log cabin has tumbled. The stone chimney remains as a beacon of the memories, but the old trails have overgrown.

Yet any bewilderment from the current state of the world would fade when Cookie settled onto a blanket among a circle of uniformed girls as a turquoise twilight dusted the horizon and, at her feet, the glow of campfire coals on the confection she helped us learn to love.