About the Chamber
Our Mission:
The Carroll County Chamber of Commerce exists to promote a sound economic environment in which our business community can prosper.
A History of the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce
By Diana Scott, Public Relations Committee
At 8 p.m. on September 12, 1929, a group of businessmen met at the Fireman’s Building in Westminster. They were there to elect a new Board Of Managers (now Board of Directors) and to discuss their involvement in the activities of the town. C. Edgar Nusbaum, the first president of the Westminster Chamber of Commerce, Inc. presided over the election.
Those elected that night were E. Edgar Nusbaum, D.S. Gehr, Denton Gehr, Joseph L. Mathias, Arthur M. Zile, T. William Mather, W.H. Davis, Charles N. Fisher, John L. Reifsnider, Ralph Bonsack, William N. Keefer, D. S. Babylon, d. Eugene Walsh, Howard T. Koontz, T.B. Cash. H. Preston Gorsuch, George E. Matthews, Charles H. Bowers and J. F. Wantz.
No one knows for sure whose idea it was to establish the Westminster Chamber of Commerce, inc. 1924. It was most likely that the men who comprised the Board of Managers in 1929 were among the same group of visionaries who organized the Chamber a few years earlier. (1)
Getting Carroll County on the map was something in which the community could take pride. It was only 12 years before this when the Chamber of Commerce of the United States was formed during the presidency of William Howard Taft. (2) Even at that, the national organization was not the first, as many local Chambers had been in operation as far back as colonial times.
