Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Rare Books
Romanism at home : letters to the Hon. Roger B. Taney
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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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Rare Books
378647
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Rare Books
253666
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Manuscripts
Hiram Barney's political, business, legal, and family papers concern a wide variety of subjects including real estate, primarily in Iowa, and New York; court cases (often pertaining to debt collection) and other legal services; politics generally, but especially patronage distribution; family affairs, business transactions concerning the Erie and other canals; small railroads (largely in the Lake Plains region); Mexico and Mexican-American relations; the Civil War; U.S. Customs Service. Barney's correspondence contains numerous references to the anti-enslavement movement in the North, the Civil War, Republican Party politics, and Barney's friendship with Abraham Lincoln. Also found throughout this portion of the collection are transportation papers dealing with Barney's interest in connection with the opening up of waterways, the railroad, and the telegraph from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Among the correspondents are William C. Bryant, William A. Butler, Salmon P. Chase, Charles P. Clinch, Erastus Corning, Edward C. Delavan, William P. Fessenden, John Jay, David W. Kilbourne, Eugene Kozlay, Abraham Lincoln, Edward L. Pierce, Matias Romero, Horatio Seymour, William T. Sherman, Edward D. Smith, Breese J. Stevens, Lewis Tappan, William D. Waterman. Real estate papers concern mostly the Half-Breed Tract between the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers. Which includes signed documents of land indentures by specific Indigenous tribal members of the Sak and Fox (Meskwaki) Nation with papers pertaining to the first Anglo proprietors and settlers. Related to Barney's real estate documents are Francis Scott Key's papers. Legal papers extend from 1825 to 1888 and includes articles of partnership, court cases, powers of attorney, and notes for collection. New York Custom House papers cover the general operations, patronage, and personnel of the Custom House, as well as records of the fraud investigations conducted by the U.S. Treasury Department.
mssHB
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Manuscripts
The collection was assembled by author and collector Grahame H. Hardy. The documents and manuscripts demonstrate the range of legal, administrative, municipal, and real estate-related transactions initiated by railroad and mining interests, businessmen, and municipalities in the San Francisco Bay area, Northern California, and western Nevada. Included in this series are legal proceedings, title deeds, mining reports and claims. Correspondence includes business and personal letters to and from Northern California lawyers, railroad and mining entrepreneurs in California and Nevada, and parties involved in the construction of the Nicaragua Canal. Included in this series are letters pertaining to the case of Daniel Sill, a San Francisco-based blacksmith and the trial of A.J. Jackson, an African American tried and acquitted in Marysville, California. Lastly, ephemera include four items: a Mission Homestead Association certificate of stock; one check payable to Jack H. Haverly, a promoter of minstrel shows, from theater producers and brothers, Gustave Frohman and Charles Frohman; the baptism certificate of Everett Loftus Saxondale Kenna; and an undated glossary of mining terms. Prominent persons and organizations featured in the collection include: California Academy of Sciences, founded in 1853 as the one of the first scientific academies west of the Atlantic seaboard; Central Pacific Railroad Company, established in 1861 and financed in part by Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, who are also mentioned in the collection; William Heath Davis (1822-1909), San Francisco merchant and author, spouse of Maria de Jesús Estudillo, who played a key role in the founding of the California cities of Oakland and San Diego; John Brooks Felton (1827-1877), San Francisco Bay Area lawyer and judge, as well as one-time mayor of Oakland, California; Joseph Pendleton Hoge (1810-1891), former U.S. Representative of Illinois and later lawyer and judge of the San Francisco Superior Court; and M.G. Upton, former official reporter of the California Assembly and author of the urban planning critique, "The Plan of San Francisco" (1869).
HM 72745
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Rare Books
379748