In March of 1955, several energetic members of the Lycoming County Historical Society took on the weighty task of launching an entirely new, scholarly journal. Editors Dr. Lewis E. Theiss, Mildred E. Kelly, Michael M. Wargo and L. Rodman Wurster offered 16 pages of biography (John Wesley Little), intrigue (“Crime on the Canal”), wildlife stories (“Panthers of the Loyalsock”) and lumbering history (“Recollections of a Boom Rat”). Why go to the effort of publishing this Journal? Dr. Theiss succinctly wrote, “the directors of the society feel that the day has come when we must ride two horses at once. In addition to the physical articles that we collect and preserve in the museum, we must see that hereafter none of the valuable written material that comes to us is lost.”
For 65 years, the Journal has been documenting the history of Lycoming County. But this history had been lost, except to those with access to the Society’s archives, where some 89 issues of the Journal repose. That has changed as of February 2020, when the board of the Society authorized the digitalization and online publication of the entire collection of Journal issues, beginning with the March 1955 edition (which you can read here).
We’ll be writing about some of the Journals during the coronavirus shut-down of the Taber Museum. But if you can’t wait for the featured edition, check out the rest of the collection that is being posted on the tabermuseum.org website.