The Mid-Appalachian Region was established on June 13, 1953 by a small group of cavers meeting in Hagerstown, Maryland. It was originally called the Eastern Region and was intended to include Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Like its predecessors, the Northeastern Regional Association (NRO) and the Virginia Region (VAR), the MAR was set up as an organization of grottos, not an organization of cavers.

The boundaries of the Mid-Appalachian Region have always been a little vague. Pennsylvania was always included; DC was always out. Maryland was mostly in but the Hagerstown Grotto that formed MAR quickly became inactive and the Baltimore Grotto is often active in the Virginia Region. Northeastern Ohio, mainly Cleveland, participated sometimes. Northern West Virginia was often part of MAR and many field meets have been held in West Virginia. In the early days the boundaries were important because each Region elected a regional representative to the NSS Board of Governors (BOG). At present, Regions serve to outline areas of caving activity with a good deal of mixing across vague boundaries and the regions have been able to live with this very comfortably.

The founding father of the MAR was Challis N. Bruce of New Castle, Pennsylvania. He organized the first formal meeting which was held October 10-12, 1953 at Shippensburg State Teachers College, currently known as Shippensburg University. At this meeting the constitution and by-laws were drawn up and were ultimately approved on November 12, 1953. The name was changed to the Mid-Appalachian Region. The Shippensburg meeting, under Bruce's leadership, also set the tone for the next several years. There were cave trips but the main part was a technical meeting of talks and slide shows. Although Bruce got the MAR off to a good start, his health failed shortly thereafter after he was forced to drop out of caving activities. For several years the MAR was moribund. It was rejuvenated in the late 1950's by cavers from Pittsburgh and Nittany Grottos; meetings were again held and MAR Bulletins were published in 1957 and 1958. A formal meeting of the Region Council on October 5, 1957 revised the constitution and by-laws to the form in which they stood for 30 years until some revisions in the late 1980s.

After the 1957 Council meeting, it became the custom to hold an annual business meeting. In the early 1960s the meeting convened at the home of Dr. Ralph W. Stone in Harrisburg, PA. After Dr. Stone's death, Jay Herbein took up the burden in 1964 and he and Kathy have been host to the annual MAR business meeting ever since. (FYI -Kathy makes very tasty BBQ at the business meeting for those attending!)

There were two conventions of the MAR in 1957, one in February at State College, Pennsylvania and another on November 9-10 at the Washington County Museum in Hagerstown, Maryland. These were rather formal attairs with formal paper presentations and a banquet with speakers. There were no formal cave trips. However, the format of the annual Regional Convention, modeled as a mini-NSS Convention, proved unworkable. Although the consitution called for both an annual field meet and an annual convention, no further conventions were held after 1957, and instead two field meets, one in the spring and one in the fall became the Region's main membership activity. This format is still presently followed.

It was decided from the beginning to produce a publication. Two of the papers given at the Shippensburg meeting in 1953 became MAR Bulletin 1. These were simply the typscripts of the papers, reproduced by mimeograph, and stapled back to back. MAR Bulletins 2 and 3 contained mainly the proceedings of the two 1957 MAR Conventions. Some abstracts and the full text of several short papers were included, along with some news, some politics, and a copy of the Region's consitution. With the demise of the MAR Conventions, there was little purpose for the MAR Bulletin. In 1958 the Bulletin was designated the vehicle for publication of the Pennsylvania Cave Survey and the publication of Region news and other commentary had to await the invention of the "MAR Breakdown" in 1986.

The life of Bernard Smeltzer and some of his contributions as one of Pennsylvania's finest cartographers!       

The Pennsylvania Cave Survey

In 2007, the responsiblities of the The Pennsylvania Cave Database, was officially transferred from Keith Wheeland, creator and administrator of the database, and placed it under the existing Pennsylvania Cave Conservancy (PCC). Today, PCC manages and maintains the cave database through the Pennsylvania Cave Database Committee (PCDC) via several county "stewards", which gather and report cave related activity within their county(ies) of responsibility. For more information regarding the Pennsylvania Cave Database, please refer to the Pennsylvania Cave Conservancy (PCC) website at   www.caves.org/conservancy/pcc/

The Mid-Appalachian Region (MAR) of the NSS, the Pennsylvania Cave Conservancy (PCC), and numerous others would like to thank Keith Wheeland for his generous time, effort, and contribution in creating, and maintaining the cave database since its inception.

*Credit is given to William B. White et. al., for providing the above information which was originally published in the MAR Bulletin 1-4, REPRINT, March 1992, with additions and updates by the MAR Webmaster for the online version.