History of the Lancaster County Historical Society John Ward Willson Loose As the Lancaster County Historical Society begins its second century of service to the community—to the residents, young and old, of Lancaster County—and to the many visitors, scholars, and researchers that come to our

Society weighed in on Lancaster's morality, it became apparent the task required more than the sharp eyes of a handful of public-spirited citizens. An agent was employed to keep an eye on what was going on in Lancaster. He checked magazine stands and motion picture houses and dance halls. He kept an

brick residences that came to line the streets of Columbia at the end of the eighteenth century. Originally the home had a very steeply gabled roof that was covered with wooden shingles �94 JOURNAL OF THE LANCASTER COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY and flanked by end chimneys. A few surviving windows reveal

Languages and Literature from Harvard University in 1974. Now a professor of German at Millersville University he was previously Executive Director of the Urban League of Lancaster County. He is a member of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and is president of the Lancaster County Historical Society. This

outstanding organizations in the social history of Lancaster, its purpose was the suppression of vice in the community. A similar group called the "Law and Order Society of Lancaster" existed in 1889, but was ineffective and shortlived.' The first meeting of the Society was November 1912 and it was incor

intersection of major east-west and north­ south roadways, Lancaster was an important eighteenth-century settlement on the primary route of westward expansion through Pennsylvania. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Lancaster was said to have been the largest inland town in America, a distinction it

York: McGraw- Hill Book Company, 1973, p. 21. 2 Jean R. Soderlund, "Women in Eightheenth-Century Pennsylvania: Toward a Model of Diversity, "The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biogra phy Volume CXV, Number 2, (April 1991): pp. 163-183. 3 Jerome H. Wood, Jr., Conestoga Crossroads: Lancaster

., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 39 and 40. 2. Ibid. 3. See Board of Health Reports, 1892-1894, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County Historical Society. 4. For a discussion of Lancaster's early water system see M. Luther Heisey, "The

following year, the Department of Pennsylvania, G.A.R. was organized in Philadelphia. The fraternity grew and by the turn of the century was a political and social force with wide power and influence. That influence grew locally, too, as the Lancaster County contingent was the only Pennsylvania county with