Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Rare Books
The Kingston & Rondout directory ... 1857, 1858
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Rare Books
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Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
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Manuscripts
A collection of 362 items which contains letters, documents, and one map (1849-1884) related to the various enterprises of John Center. These include his gardening business, real estate, mining transactions, and civic enterprises in San Francisco from 1849 to 1884. Also included are papers regarding the Center Company, water rights, and mining in the Owens Valley in 1863.
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Manuscripts
A collection of approximately 3000 items from 1770 to 1871, it consists of the personal and professional papers of John Arnold Rockwell, chiefly his incoming and outgoing correspondence. The papers document Rockwell's legal career; the development of the U.S. Court of Claims; politics; the Constitutional Union Party of 1860; land development, particularly in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan; transportation, including land grants in aid of canals and railroads such as the Illinois Central and the projected Pacific Railroads; mining; and banking. Correspondents include, among others, John William Allen, Reverdy Johnson, Charles William Rockwell, and Dixwell Lathrop, who was a member of the Rockwell Land Company and one of the founders of Rockwell Colony in La Salle, Illinois. Also included are a letter book, plats, Dixwell Lathrop's notebooks, newspaper clippings, and the 1857 legal brief in the case of the United States, appellants vs. Charles Fossatt, regarding the New Almaden Quicksilver Mines. The earliest portion of Rockwell's correspondence includes letters from his father Charles Rockwell and brother Charles William Rockwell who had moved to Savannah, Georgia in 1817 to run a shipping business. The post-1861 part of the collection consists mainly of the incoming correspondence of John A. Rockwell's youngest son Alfred Perkins Rockwell, a Yale graduate, mining engineer, Civil War veteran, and businessman. Also included is correspondence of the Perkins and Tisdale families, including Rockwell's father-in-law Joseph Perkins who died in 1832 and was a Revolutionary War soldier, a Major in the Connecticut militia, physician, and businessman; also, Simon Perkins, John Tisdale, Elkanah Tisdale, and others. This correspondence deals chiefly with the properties in Connecticut and the Western Reserve.
mssRO
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Manuscripts
The collection contains letters, letterbooks, documents, records, and manuscripts that document Barlow's legal, business, and political career, and his cultural and social pursuits. Barlow's legal and business papers constitute the bulk of the collection and cover 1855 to 1889. This portion of the collection deals with financing, building and management of railroads -- both Eastern and Western divisions of the Ohio and Mississippi, the Atlantic & Great Western, the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio, the Little Miami, the Columbus and Xenia, the Erie, and the New York, Erie & Western; Barlow's lobbying on behalf of Texas and Pacific Railroad Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company; his involvement in the affairs of the Tehuantepec railroad route in Mexico, mining promotions and operations, including the notorious Arizona diamond hoax; land speculation (farm lands in Illinois, Iowa, and Ohio and urban properties in St. Louis, Mo.); his patronage of the New York subway and telephone enterprises, and his part ownership of the New York World. Political and military correspondence and manuscripts cover Barlow's involvement in Democratic politics at both national and state levels, that started in 1856 and continued until his death. The papers deal with Barlow's role in the nomination of James Buchanan for President, 1856, and his administration; Democratic National Convention at Charleston, 1860; George McClellan's presidential bid, the National Union Club, congressional elections, Tilden, Hancock, and Cleveland campaigns, 1876 to 1886. This portion of the collection also contains reports from the Eastern theater of the Civil War that Barlow received from his agents in the field. Among the correspondents are William T. Sherman, and T.J. Barnett, a minor official at the Department of the Interior and the Washington correspondent of the New York Journal of Commerce, who provided an insight into Lincoln's White House. Also included are items reflecting Barlow's role in social and cultural life of New York -- his friendship with William Cullen Bryant and Bret Harte, patronage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Academy of Music, and the New York Historical Society, his collections of colonial Americana and rare books, etc. Correspondents include William Henry Aspinwall, Henry Douglas Bacon, T.J. Barnett, James Asheton Bayard, Jr., August Belmont, Judah Philip Benjamin, Montgomery Blair, William Montague Browne, Benjamin Franklin Butler, Roscoe Conkling, George Ticknor Curtis, John Henry Dillon, William Maxwell Evarts, Henry Harrisse, Ben Holladay, Hugh Judge Jewett, Clarence King, George Brinton McClellan, James McHenry, Manton Malon Marble, Thomas Alexander Scott, Horatio Seymour, William Davis. Materials created by US presidents in this collection include James Buchanan autograph letters signed to Samuel L.M. Barlow, 1867 May 2 and May 22; Grover Cleveland autograph letter signed to Samuel L.M. Barlow, 1884 October 12; Millard Fillmore autograph letter signed to Charles Day, 1870 October 12; Andrew Jackson autograph letter to Mahlon Dickerson, 1835 June 9; also present is a contemporary copy of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee special order to Thomas Mann Randolph Talcott regarding Confederate soldiers paroled at Appomattox, 1865 April 10.
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Manuscripts
The collection consists of manuscripts, letters, documents, maps, 35 notebooks and field books related to Ephraim G. Squier's unrealized project for the Honduras Interoceanic Railway. There is material related to explorations and surveys with reference to the practicality of a ship canal in the area, as well as maps of both Central and South America.
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