Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
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Memorial sketches. Heman Humphrey. Sophia Porter Humphrey
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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
In 1568 James Humphrey assembled and copied out a miscellany of models, forms, and calculations which were in use at the time, to serve as a working manual for other clerks and administrators. Sometime after 1580, Humphrey transcribed materials for this second Book of forms. Some of the contents duplicate sections in the 1568 book, but some sections are new. This manuscript contains ten pages of tables for computing costs of cheese, beef, and herring in varying quantities, and table of allowances for victualing ships. It also contains forms for pressing and recruiting mariners (giving specific dates, places, and names), and where and when to report for duty. New to this manuscript includes forms for searching and salvaging ship materials, for recording identities, destinations, and cargoes of merchants and mariners, for recording names of murdered men and their murderers, as well as cause of death, weapon used, and other details.
mssHM 80802
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Manuscripts
Letters from Humphrey Griffith to his mother Mary and brother Reece, written from 1849 to 1857 and covering Griffith's travels to California and his life and experiences there. The letters begin in St. Louis, where Humphrey was waiting to depart for California with a large number of other immigrants ("the merchants do know a Californian as soon as they see him," he wrote), and trace his travels through Indian Territory (he wrote to his mother of his well-being and religious faith, noting that "God is great - he is the same God on the prairie or in the Temple"), his stops at Scott's Bluffs, Castle Bluffs, and Chimney Rock (where he inscribed his name "some 200 feet up"), and his encounters with Sioux Indians near Chimney Rock, where they "came in and we had a village of fifty lodges containing near a thousand Indians." The rest of the letters were written from California, and Humphrey specifically writes of his initial situation in Washington, agriculture, the price of goods, the uncertain nature of his business ventures, damaging rain and flooding (1852), his election to the California legislature (1853), and his canvassing activities for James Buchanan (1856). He also writes of family matters, including his love for his fiancé Helen, whose parents opposed her moving to California, his marriage to a woman named Cordelia (1852), and his grief over the death of their 2-year-old daughter Laura from typhoid in 1857. The final letter was written by Humphrey's friend Joseph J. Underhill to Mary Griffith following Humphrey's death in 1865.
mssHM 74800-74815
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37695
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358331