This first issue of Cumberland County History inaugurates a new era in publishing for the Cumberland County Historical Society and the Hamilton Library Association. Publications, which have been a mainstay of the society's programming for more than a century, are an activity of great interest to the membership. Since its founding in 1874 the society has printed and made available several hundred individual titles. In addition, during the past decade the society reprinted all three of its county histories and the 1872 Cumberland County Atlas as well. Except for the planned reprint of the 1858 map of Cumberland County, from the actual surveys of H. F. Bridgens, all of the standard reference works now have been made available. For these efforts the society has received one national award from the American Association of State and Local History and is recognized as a leader in this field by its sister societies in the Pennsylvania Federation of Historical Societies.
The society is now ten years into its second century. And, although we are indebted to those who paved the way and who set high standards for us to follow, the time is right to do more than publish an occasional twenty-to-forty page booklet or monograph. During the past two years, ever since Robert Grant Crist first pressed the publications committee to make a commitment in this direction, we have carefully considered the advantages and disadvantages of publishing a journal. Except for a little more effort on the part of the committee and the need to recruit an editor, we soon realized that the advantages clearly outweighed the disadvantages.
The recommendation to the society's Board of Directors was based on the fact that among our society's important aims is the promotion of a wider interest in local history. A journal is seen as one way to reach a larger historically minded audience in Cumberland County. For one thing, it would regularize publication: exclusive dependence for occasional publications on papers delivered at the society's formal meetings had become at best precarious; further, these booklets or pamphlets, like third class mail, tended to go unnoticed and unfiled in library and other collections. For another, a journal would permit coverage of a greater variety of aspects of the county's history and culture and use of varying approaches, such as articles, short features on genealogy and the society's collections, reports of county-wide society activities, notes and documents, and book review essays, together with valuable or entertaining items that have not necessarily been the topics of delivered papers. Still another function of a journal would be to help move the society into the distinguished company of the societies in Lancaster, Norristown, Reading, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, which for many decades have produced informative and widely read journals of continuing notice and value to historians and researchers. Publication of a journal, in sum, is a mark of the growing maturity of the Society, which has recently completed a successful endowment campaign. In terms of feasibility, it was concluded that the Society could publish a journal as contemplated for approximately the same cost as the occasional papers published in the past.
In recent years, researchers seeking to interpret history have increasingly recognized the value of photographic collections. Such images provide us with important information often available nowhere else. Visually accurate, they often have the power to evoke a time long since lost.