SIDEBAR Fall 2021 - 16

MONTGOMERY B AR .O R G
SIDEBAR FEATURE
THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Preserving Our Past
By Peter E. Moore, Esq., and Mark D. Turetsky, Esq.
T
he Montgomery Bar Association is 136 years old having been formally
organized on March 14, 1885 with 51 members. Those members included
such notable names as Aaron S. Swartz, H.K. Weand (both then judges
of the Court of Common Pleas), Theodore W. Bean, Joseph Fornance, Jacob A.
Strassburger and William F. Dannehower. The organizational meeting took place in
the law library of the 1854 Court House.
The new Bar Association at a subsequent meeting on April 4, 1885 addressed
not only a constitution and by-laws but also the adoption of a minimum fee bill
and the Association's opposition to a bill then pending in the legislature permitting
attorneys of one Pennsylvania county to practice statewide without formal admission
to each county. It was also then decided that the Association's annual meeting was to
be held in January, a practice which continues until this day. Only members of the
Montgomery Bar would be admitted to join the Association with a membership fee
set at $1.00 and annual dues set at $.50 later raised to $1.00.
All organizations maintain records, important documents, etc., and the
Montgomery Bar Association is no different in that regard. In fact, the constitution
was amended in 1903 to mandate that the association collect and preserve all other
historical data pertaining to the Bench and Bar and the Administration of Justice
in the judicial district (county). However, although one of the stated objects of the
association is the maintenance of our historical records, artifacts, photos, portraits,
biographies, minutes and other data, that has not, for a very long time, been a
priority.
Some ten (10) years ago the Historical Committee of the Association began a
concerted effort to accumulate, catalog and preserve the Association's data not only
for posterity but also to comply with the 1903 mandate that it do so. While the
documents, photos, records and data have always been " someplace, " they were never
more than an accumulation without any semblance of order or a proper home. That
finally changed in 2020 when the Board of Directors authorized funding for the
Historical Committee to engage a professional archivist.
Nancy Sullivan, an archivist with the Montgomery County Historical Society,
commenced her work in the fall of 2020 and by the spring of 2021, all of the
Association's " data " had been organized and cataloged and given a permanent home
on the second floor of the bar building in Norristown, a significant improvement over
its prior location in the damp confines of the basement of the MCAP building on
Cherry Street.
What do we have? Quite a bit if we include the pictures, portraits, books and
artifacts on display throughout the bar building itself. To be accurate, what we do
have is incomplete. However, we have correspondence over 100 years old, many
16 SIDEBAR
http://montgomerybar.org
SIDEBAR Fall 2021

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