Baker, Obadiah Ethelbert Papers

This collection consists of correspondence and individual manuscript volumes of Civil war soldier and teacher Obadiah E. Baker and his wife, Melissa Dalton Baker, of Iowa and Northern California, and their family between the late 1850s and early 1900s.

Notably, the collection contains daily letters kept by Obadiah and Melissa Baker during the Civil War in the form of journals, which they exchanged with each other. Some of these volumes are fair copies of the letter books made by Obadiah Baker in the 1870s-1880s, while working on a memoir. Topics covered in the letters include military operations of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment on the Western front; camp life of a soldier: payments, foraging; drills and inspections, picket duty roads, recreations, hospitals, medical care; doctors and nurses, especially work of Catholic Sisters of Charity; and Confederate prisoners.

In addition, there are poems (nearly 200 loose pieces), notebooks, and essays of Obadiah Baker, often reflecting on the Civil War experience and memory in the 1860s-1900s; family correspondence chiefly sent between the Bakers and their children, while the children attended the San Jose Normal School in the 1880s. The correspondence touches on family news, Baker's teaching experience, and, occasionally, business and financial affairs.