While browsing through the 1943 volume of The Christian Observer this morning, looking for articles by a particular author, I noticed the following short piece, relevant to our work here in gathering the histories of PCA churches. This article provides some comparison with how that work was proceeding in the old Southern Presbyterian denomination in 1943:
THE RECORDS OF SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIANISM.
The women of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in recent years have been doing excellent work in compiling the history of the Church. Led by Mrs. William T. Fowler, of Lexington, Kentucky, whose articles appear frequently in the columns of The Christian Observer, and who is historian of the Committee on Woman’s Work, hundreds of women in the local churches, and in the Presbyteries and Synods, have compiled for permanent preservation the local and sectional records and historical sketches which as the years pass would become increasingly difficult to find, if indeed they did not altogether cease to exist. As general historian of the committee, Mrs. Fowler since 1927 has been assembling this historical material for preservation in the Historical Foundation’s library at Montreat. The following comparison will reveal something of the work that is being accomplished :
In 1930 there were eighty-one Presbyterial historians who reported manuscripts from 1,396 churches. Last year, 2,269 histories or supplements were added, an increase of 544 over the previous year and of 1,037 over the year 1939-40. At the end of the last church year, there were 202 standard binders in the library and a number on order.
All of this is in addition to the work done by church historians through the regular channels. At the present rate, in a few more years, if they are not already so, the records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States will be the most complete of any denomination in the world.
It has been a labor of love on the part of the women, hundreds of whom have been faithful in the tedious and painstaking work necessary to such an undertaking.
[excerpted from The Christian Observer 131.5 (3 February 1943): 2.
