ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS

Some copying of records was done, but by the middle of the
century (1859-61) John Henry Alexander and Ethan Allen reported
steady deterioration, with many of the items listed by Ridgely
already lost. These two distinguished scholars prepared a Calendar
of Maryland State Papers which is still useful. In 1866, Colonel
Brantz Mayer reported in some detail on the State records and
suggested a plan for their care which was later adopted.

Nothing was done at that time, but the report was used in 1878
in a renewed appeal for the care of the records by Dr. Lewis H.
Steiner, an appeal which was supported by the Maryland Histor-
ical Society. This new effort bore fruit in 1882 when the Assembly
ordered all the early records, covering roughly the Colonial and
Revolutionary periods, to be transferred from Annapolis to the
vaults of the Historical Society in Baltimore. Of great importance
was the fact that an appropriation was made then for the care and
publication of the records which has continued to the present time,
although it is now used solely for publication.

The Maryland Historical Society became at that time, in fact,
the archival agency of the state. It had already received some rec-
ords in 1846-1847, a great collection came as a result of the Act
of 1882, and many other lots were sent from time to time even as
late as 1927. However, the Land Office had early become the de-
pository for early Land records and for the records of the Colonial
Probate Court while the Court of Appeals held its own early re-
cords and most of those of the defunct Provincial Court and General
Court. County records remained in the county seats except that for
a time the Charles County records had been deposited at the Land
Office, and this agency also held some of the Anne Arundel County
court records through 1935.

While, in a sense, the early state records were provided for at
the turn of the century, the county records had for the most part
continued to be ill-housed and subject to every kind of destructive
agent, from the damp, the heat, the vermin, the pilferer who operated
slowly but surely throughout the state, to the disastrous fires that
destroyed a great proportion of the early records in St. Mary's,
Calvert and Dorchester counties. Stimulated by the action of other
states and the educational campaign of the American Historical As-
sociation, the Maryland Assembly, in 1904 (Chapter 282), provided