40 years ago — January 2, 1978
The change in our volume number with this issue to 160 is the reason for the reappearance of our genealogical chart on our cover. … We cannot trace the path from paper to paper, week by week, back to the 1819 origin in Mt. Zion, Ga. What we can do is to identify with Benjamin Gildersleeve, whose length of service has never been challenged. It is a clear line … from The Missionary to The Georgia Reporter to The Charleston Observer to the Watchman and Observer in Richmond … to his concluding service in 1860. … This Gildersleeve came from the neighborhood of Norwalk, Conn., he attended Middlebury College and Princeton Seminary. … He went from New England to Georgia’s Mt. Zion as a teacher when he was 23. Soon he produced The Missionary, and from that time until 1860, he was the Presbyterian editor, spending his late years, until his death in 1875, as a home missionary in Southwest Virginia. … The reproduced titles of papers that have converged to form The Outlook’s ancestry are sometimes referred to as tombstones. Out of all these beginnings, only one remains.
From the editorial “Volume 160 and B. Gildersleeve,” by Aubrey N. Brown Jr.
