For nearly a century, the rank of Eagle Scout has stood as the ultimate award a Boy Scout could achieve.

Boy Scouts can earn as many as 121 merit badges, and if a Scout earns about one-sixth of them – 21 – he qualifies for Eagle Scout, an honor recipients proudly hold throughout their lives.

Earning those 21 badges is difficult, though. Less than 4 percent of all Scouts ever earn the Eagle Scout rank.

So among Eagle Scouts, Jonathan Yarde of rural Huntington County stands out.

Yarde earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 2005 when he was 13, younger than most. With no higher rank to achieve, he decided to try to earn what are called palms, additional pins awarded for continuing to be active in Scouting and for earning more merit badges.

About a year and a half ago, Yarde sat down and calculated that to earn the maximum number of palms possible, he would have to earn 110 merit badges. Then he figured, why not earn them all?

Last month, at a court of honor, Yarde was recognized for achieving just that, for earning every merit badge the Boy Scouts offer.

To give you an idea how big a deal this is, in the nearly 100 years of Scouting, only 103 people have ever earned every merit badge available, and many of those did it when there were far fewer merit badges available.

Yarde, though, had something of an edge. He’s home-schooled, and that added flexibility to his schedule, he said. If he had to plan a field trip to, say, a trucking company’s hub, he could arrange that in the morning and catch up on his classwork later in the day or even on a weekend.

Plus, he lives on a farm, which made it easier to earn a merit badge in something like farm mechanics than someone who lives in the city, where the biggest piece of equipment is a weed trimmer, and both his mother and father are big outdoors people.

For Yarde, the most difficult merit badges to earn were auto maintenance and medicine. Auto maintenance was "extremely intense, almost over the edge for what you need to learn to keep a car up today."

He doesn’t know how a younger Scout could even start to master the work involved in earning that badge. The merit badge in medicine involved mounds of paperwork and tedium.

"Anyone doing that has his work cut out for him," he said.

In the last year, Yarde has been working on five to six different merit badges at a time.

So as far as Scouting goes, there is nothing more for Yarde to do, no higher rank to earn, no other hills to climb. But he remains involved, largely because he’s met most of his friends through Scouts and they are still involved.

Yarde will be a senior next year and will continue in Scouting. He’s looking at colleges and hopes to find one that has some sort of outdoors club where he can continue the activities he’s pursued the last several years.

He’ll be studying business management or business administration, though, a choice that was inspired by the things he learned while earning one of his merit badges, American Business.

"That’s the whole merit badge concept," Yarde said. "It’s all about exposing people to a lot of different things."