Marian S. Carson Collection

A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress

Prepared by Michael McElderry with the assistance of Kathryn Sukites

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

Washington, D.C.

2000

Contact information: http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/mss/address.html

Finding aid encoded by Library of Congress
Manuscript Division, 2003

Finding aid URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms003008

Latest revision: 2009 September

Table of Contents

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

Personal Names

Organizations

Subjects

Locations

Occupations

Administrative Information

Provenance:

Processing History:

Transfers:

Copyright Status:

Access and Restrictions:

Electronic Format:

Preferred Citation:

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

Organization of the Papers

Description of Series

Container List

Collection Summary

Selected Search Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the Library's online catalog. They are grouped by name of person or organization, by subject or location, and by occupation and listed alphabetically therein.

Administrative Information

The Marian S. Carson Collection was acquired by the Library of Congress by gift of Marian S. Carson in 1996 and by purchase, 1996-1999.

The Marian S. Carson Collection was originally arranged by Carson in eight series or subject categories within which items were organized according to an alphanumeric classification. The catalogs or checklists to which the classification numbers were originally keyed are located in containers 56-57 of this collection.

The Carson collection contains a variety of types of material. A Library committee including representatives from the Manuscript Division, the Prints and Photographs Division, and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division was formed to coordinate policy and establish administrative guidelines for the parts of the collection assigned to the appropriate custodial division. The collection is described in Gathering History: The Marian S. Carson Collection of Americana (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999).

Items removed from the Manuscript Division portion of the collection have been transferred to other custodial divisions of the Library. Maps have been transferred to the Geography and Maps Division. Music manuscripts and printed musical scores have been transferred to the Music Division. Some books, broadsides, pamphlets, and printed ephemera have been transferred to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Some prints and photographs have been transferred to the Prints and Photographs Division. All transfers are identified in these divisions as part of the Marian S. Carson Collection.

The status of copyright in the unpublished writings of Marian S. Carson is governed by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, U.S.C.).

The Marion S. Carson Collection is open to research. Researchers are advised to contact the Manuscript Reading Room prior to visiting. Many collections are stored off-site and advance notice is needed to retrieve these items for research use.

Selections from the Marian S. Carson Collection are available on the Library of Congress Web site.

Researchers wishing to cite this collection should include the following information: Container number, Marian S. Carson Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Biographical Note

Scope and Content Note

The Americana collection of Marian Sadtler Carson (1905- ) spans the years 1656-1995 with the bulk of the material dating from 1700 to 1876. Gathered by Philadelphia resident Marian Carson and other members of her family, the Marian S. Carson Collection contains a variety of formats and types of material, including more than ten thousand historical letters and manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, prints and drawings, books and pamphlets, maps, and printed ephemera from the colonial era through the 1876 centennial of the United States. The Manuscript Division shares custodial responsibility for the collection with the Library's Geography and Map Division, Music Division, Prints and Photographs Division, and Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The portion of the Carson Collection in the Manuscript Division contains correspondence, legal and financial records, political documents, journals, military records, broadsides, and illustrated and printed ephemera. Some of the highlights of the collection include letters of United States presidents and several signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as extensive files of manuscripts, broadsides, and ephemera relating to American military, political, and social history. The collection further contains significant files of manuscripts and printed ephemera devoted to African-American, Native American, and women's history, the development of the American textile industry, canals, postal service, transportation, and public institutions such as hospitals and schools. Notable among the material is a large body of papers pertaining to the founding of the Free Quakers in America. In its depth and variety the collection provides documentation on the founding of the nation, the shaping of the national government and judicial system, and the development of nearly every realm of American endeavor, from the arts and literature, education, law, and religion to commerce, finance, industry, medicine, science and technology. The collection also contains a small series of Carson family papers.

With Marian Carson's native city as its focus, the Carson Collection contains individual items of great rarity as well as historically important collections of family and personal papers. The collection was constructed upon materials accumulated through several generations by Carson and other family members and represents a "collection of collections." Displaying both an antiquarian interest and scholarly instincts, Carson took an active role in shaping her collection by arranging items in subject categories or series of her own design. Carson further devised an elaborate alphanumeric classification system to identify and organize headings and subheadings within these series. In keeping with the spirit and objectives of her arrangement and to the extent practicable in conformity with existing archival standards, the Carson Collection, as presently arranged, retains much of Carson's original organization, including her alphanumeric classifications, which are cited in parentheses immediately following related headings and subheadings, and is arranged in the following series: Fine Arts and Literature, Practical Arts, Entertainment, Printed Matter, Social History, Biography, State and Local History, Political History, Historical Letters and Manuscripts, General Correspondence, and Carson Family Papers. The collection also contains items from Carson's personal papers which document specific acquisition and reference activities and provide general background information regarding the formation and development of her collection. This material, which is filed throughout the collection, is listed as "background and reference material" and organized as the first element in the filing sequence regardless of alphabetical arrangement.

Carson's collecting had its origin in the decorative arts, and the Fine Arts and Literature series contains material relating to the fine arts, decorative and domestic arts, literature, and the performing arts. As occurs throughout the collection, the series contains an array of seemingly ordinary documents, such as accounts, receipts, and printed items, whose research value is realized in the great detail they provide about daily life in early America. Files relating to Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale and his family are of particular interest.

The Practical Arts series contains files on advertising, food and cooking, general science, industries and trades, law and government, liquor and tobacco, medicine, prints and photographs, textiles, transportation, and wine making. The material includes an abundance of advertising ephemera, such as illustrated billheads, cards, covers, and letterheads of various business and commercial concerns. Science and medicine are fields in which Carson enthusiastically collected. Notable physicians and scientists listed in the series include Caleb Cresson, Robert Hare, Joseph Henry, Edward Jenner, George Ord, Philip Syng Physick, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Say, William Shippen, and Caspar Wistar. Substantial material on the papermaking industry includes files of Charles and John Cadwalader and the Rittenhouse family. Law represents another of Carson's collecting interests. Files containing letters, documents, and trial notes of William Rawle from the libel trial of Thomas Cooper, United States v. Cooper, are located in the Practical Arts series. The series also contains an 1801 report on meteorology and its relation to wine making in America sent by Peter Legaux to Thomas Jefferson.

The Entertainment series includes items on such diverse topics as cartoons, circuses and sideshows, expositions and fairs, holiday celebrations, sports, Thanksgiving proclamations, and the theater. The series also contains material regarding carriers' addresses, which took the form of poems and other compositions customarily written by carriers of early American newspapers and other periodicals to their subscribers at the beginning of the new year.

In addition to Americana, the Carson Collection contains a small number of historically symbolic British documents including printed copies of the Stamp Act and Sugar Act. These items are filed within the Printed Matter series along with other documents and records concerning a wide variety of subjects, including banking and commerce, postal service, printing and publishing, ships and shipping, and telegraph service. The financial history of various businesses and corporations, the Confederate States of America, and national, state, and municipal governments is documented by banknotes, bills of exchange, checks, paper money from both domestic and foreign sources, bond and stock certificates, lottery tickets, and revenue stamps.

The Printed Matter series also includes items from Carson's postal collection that celebrate the themes of American geographic and commercial expansion. In addition to postmarked letters, cards, and covers, the series contains an important eyewitness account of the departure of a Pony Express rider from St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1860. Reflecting the position of Philadelphia as a center of American printing and publishing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the series also contains letters and documents representing the city's leading booksellers and printers, including Robert Aitken, Benjamin Franklin Bache, the Bradford family, Mathew Carey, William Cobbett, John Dunlap, Benjamin Franklin, and William W. Woodward. The development of the American internal transportation system is yet another point of interest in such material as business and financial records, letters, and printed ephemera relating to canals, plank roads, railroads, stagecoach lines, steamboats, tollroads, and turnpikes. Related transportation files can also be found in the Practical Arts series.

The history of social movements and classes proved fertile ground for Carson's collecting, as documented in the Social History series comprising material on African-American history, communes, education, labor, Native Americans, Quakers, religion, travel, and women. Items of interest to Native American history include contemporary copies of speeches by Cornplanter, Half-Town, and Big-Tree, chiefs of the Seneca Nation; an elegy to the Bloody Indian Battle Fought at Miami Village, November 4, 1791, printed in 1802; and a letter written by Alexander Addison, judge, to Thomas Mifflin, governor of Pennsylvania, 1796, reporting on his attempts to administer justice on the Pennsylvania frontier. Carson's interest in documenting the lives of women is reflected in letters and documents of the Coates-Hornor family, Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Nellie Lincoln Rossiter.

The prominent role played by the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in the development of the economic, educational, political, social, and cultural life of Philadelphia in colonial America is at the center of the Carson Collection. The Social History series contains letters and documents relating to the Friends, including transcripts of meetings of the Free Quakers, also known as the "Fighting Quakers," society members who chose to support the American Revolution. The lives of slaves are revealed through accounts, bills of sale, indentures, legal documents, and records of manumission. Correspondence of Quaker merchants James and Joseph Bringhurst document the administration of a school for African Americans in Philadelphia in the 1780s. The series further includes documents relating to various educational institutions, including many Quaker schools. Coates and Wetherill family items are of special note.

The Biography series also contains abundant material relating to Free Quakers, especially the Coates-Hornor, Cresson, Waln, Wetherill, and Yarnell families. The papers of the Waln and Wetherill families, prominent merchants and manufacturers, are particularly revealing. The Waln family account book, 1768-1769, and papers of Richard Waln document the degree of Quaker influence in the civic life and merchant culture of Philadelphia, while the Wetherill family papers represent the single most extensive and substantive file on the Free Quakers in the collection. The American Revolution tested the Quaker community and forced its members to reconcile their commitment to the war of independence with their pacifist beliefs. The papers of Samuel Wetherill (1736-1816) contain an assortment of letters, accounts, broadsides, legal documents, oaths of allegiance, political petitions, subscription lists, and other items documenting both the formation of the Free Quaker group and its contributions to the war effort. Carson also assembled records concerning the construction of the Free Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia, 1783-1784, which includes rare examples of architectural drawings of the period. A record book of the Overseers of the Poor, 1780-1784, illustrates the benevolent philanthropy practiced by the Free Quakers.

The Biography series further contains letters, journals, and other documents arranged by family or personal name and continues many of the same subjects and themes noted in other parts of the collection. In medicine, the casebooks of Benjamin Hornor Coates and records of the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, are particularly important. Other members of the Coates-Hornor family whose names are listed here include Samuel Coates, Eliza Hornor, and Sarah Hornor, whose detailed account of her 1794 trip from Philadelphia to New England is recorded in "Journal to New England." The history of photography is documented in the papers of the McAllister family, Philadelphia opticians and pioneers in the field of photography. A notebook containing articles and illustrations of optical and scientific instruments kept by John McAllister (1786-1877) is of special interest.

The Penn family papers in the Biography series relate to the founding and early development of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In addition to letters, appointments, commissions, deeds, and land grants, the papers also contain original and file copies of Pennsylvania laws, petitions, and other provincial executive and legislative documents, among them a bound volume containing a manuscript entitled "Laws Made and Passed by William Penn, 1700-1709."

The role of the Continental Congress and the nature of political partisanship in the founding of the nation can also be studied in the Biography series. The former is discussed in the papers of Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, while the latter appears in the letters of Samuel Wetherill (1764-1829), a Pennsylvania state legislator who described efforts to choose electors for the 1800 presidential campaign. Other important collections of family and personal papers in the Biography series include those of the Biddle, Bloomfield, Booth, and Doan families, Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Girard, Andrew Hamilton, Joshua Humphreys, Timothy Matlack, David Rittenhouse, Robert Troup, and William White.

The State and Local History series contains records relating mostly to Pennsylvania and especially to Philadelphia. Correspondence, accounts and receipts, deeds and surveys, illustrated ephemera and printed matter, and indentures and other financial and legal material document a cross section of the city's civic, commercial, and professional institutions and provide a portrait of early American urban life. Charitable, community, cultural, economic, fraternal, and social organizations featured in the series include the American Philosophical Society, Asylum Company, Library Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, State Society of the Cincinnati of Pennsylvania, and United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures. The series contains many examples of ephemera associated with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and material relating to the development of the city's Fairmount Park, one of the oldest and largest urban park systems in America. The park's records document the planning and construction of its canals and bridges, landscape design, and waterworks, one of the great public works projects of its time. The law, a profession often associated with Philadelphia, is represented in the files of William Bradford, Edward Burd, Peter Evans, Isaac Howell, Eli K. Price, William Rawle, Edward Shippen, John Chew Thomas, Edward Tilghman, Garret Dorset Wall, Bushrod Washington, and Jasper Yeates. The law files also include a receipt book, 1786, kept by Dolley Madison's first husband, John Todd (1719-1793).

Although Philadelphia provided the geographic focal point around which the Carson Collection was formed, Carson also collected outside that city's limits as well. The State and Local History series includes files from California to Virginia, including a letter in the Virginia file from Archibald Carey to Thomas Jefferson, 1781, requesting troops and supplies for the Continental army.

The Political History series contains material relating to American military and political history ranging from the colonial and Revolutionary War period through the Civil War. "Letters and documents" subheadings organized within Revolutionary War files contain items documenting the American cause. The development and expansion of the United States Navy is illustrated in the letters and documents of Joshua Humphreys, Timothy Pickering, and William Rush concerning the design and construction of six frigates, 1795-1797. Civil War documents include correspondence, family and personal papers, illustrated and printed ephemera, and military records such as instructions, muster rolls, rules and regulations, vouchers, and medical papers, including items of the United States Sanitary Commission. Papers of the Bennett, Clayton, and Stacey families and of J. William Hoffman, Robert Riggs, Boyd M. Smith, and Robert Stewart provide firsthand accounts of Civil War action and of life in camp and at home.

The Historical Letters and Manuscripts series, consisting of especially rare and important items, adds rich detail to the broader topics listed above and is organized within two headings: "autograph letters and documents" arranged by name of writer and "broadsides and manuscripts" arranged chronologically. Documents related to the nation's founding and expansion include "A True Copy from the Minutes" of the first Continental Congress printed in 1775; a letter from naval officer John Ashmead to financier Robert Morris, 1777, concerning the payment of wages, appended with an autograph note signed John Hancock; various oaths of allegiance, 1777-1796; a letter from Thomas Jefferson, United States minister to France, to M. Sauvage, attorney to the French parliament, 1788, regarding payment for wartime services of foreign officers; George Washington's printed proclamation of public thanksgiving, 1795; a letter from Secretary of State Timothy Pickering to Rufus King, United States minister to Great Britain, relating plans for the official government memorial service honoring George Washington, 1799; a letter from Secretary of State James Monroe to Joseph Bloomfield, military commander, 1814, explaining his decision to build upon American victories over British forces in the War of 1812; and a letter from Joel Abbot, naval commander of a United States frigate, to fellow naval officer Andrew H. Foote, 1853, proposing a mission to "explore the Rivers and Interior of Africa." Among other prominent leaders represented in the series are Josiah Bartlett, William Bingham, Charles Carroll, John Dickinson, James Duane, Albert Gallatin, Alexander Hamilton, Francis Hopkinson, Samuel Huntington, Henry Lee, Luther Martin, James McHenry, Thomas Mifflin, John Nicholson, George Read, Joseph Reed, and Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben.

The series also contains documents concerning the organization of government and the rule of law in the new republic, including the manuscript draft of William Paterson's speech in support of the Supreme Court and the separation of powers in the federal government, 1789, and a printed copy of An Act to Establish the Judicial Courts of the United States, 1793, signed by Thomas Jefferson. Supreme Court justices represented in the series include Charles Evans Hughes, John Jay, John Marshall, William H. Taft, and James Wilson. Presidential letters and documents include those by Chester Alan Arthur, James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, James Monroe, James K. Polk, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Martin Van Buren, George Washington, and Woodrow Wilson.

Organization of the Papers

The collection is arranged in thirteen series:

• Fine Arts and Literature, 1697-1992, n.d.
• Practical Arts, 1700-1994, n.d.
• Entertainment, 1802-1991, n.d.
• Printed Matter, 1725-1995, n.d.
• Social History, 1656-1992, n.d.
• Biography, 1681-1979, n.d.
• State and Local History, 1682-1990, n.d.
• Political History, 1755-1988, n.d.
• Historical Letters and Manuscripts, 1747-1934, n.d.
• General Correspondence, 1794-1933, n.d.
• Carson Family Papers, 1882-1994, n.d.
• Oversize, 1682-1902, n.d.

Description of Series

Container List