At this time when we are planning our 90th anniversary celebration later this year, it is very timely to announce that the Maryland State Archives has made 13 photo scrapbooks of early MCM activities accessible on its web site.
About 25 years ago, one of our club leaders placed about 30 boxes of old club records in the Maryland State Archives (MSA) for permanent storage. Our materials are in the Special Collections division of MSA. (Once deposited, the records cannot be removed.). The early records include 13 scrapbooks of photos for the years 1934-1954. Currently, MCM is paying MSA to digitalize some of our early records so that our history will be available on-line for viewing by interested members of the public, including Mountain Club members. MSA has completed the first group of records–the scrapbooks–and made them available on-line so anyone can see them.
Those scrapbooks are great visual evidence of how active our club was even in its early years, with a busy schedule of hikes across Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, as well as skiing, rock climbing, and trail work trips. They demonstrate how club activities were very different in many ways (and yet, very similar in other ways) to our modern club. To view these old photos, go to this link Mountain Club of Maryland Collection-Series 18 inventory, then click on any of the links for individual scrapbooks.
MSA is now working on the second step of the project: scanning our early club newsletters. Eventually, these documents will also be available on-line to anyone interested in MCM’s history.
