Duryea family papers

A family archive which includes correspondence, account books, legal documents, political writings, family papers, ephemera, and other material that document the history of New York and the Hudson Valley from the 1750s, through the Revolutionary War, to the end of the Civil War era.

Most of the collection is centered on the brothers Abraham Duryea (1742-1802) and Stephen Duryea (1744-1776), and their extended family, including Abraham Duryea's second wife Phebe Remsen Duryea (1753-1844), her children Jane Remsen Amory and John R. Remsen, granddaughter Phoebe Helen Robinson (1826-1910), and great-grandchildren Duryea Remsen Robinson and Mary Robinson (-1863).

The correspondence series includes mainly personal letters containing family news of health, birth, marriages, illness, and death; both the Revolutionary War and Civil War are discussed in the letters. The nineteenth century letters are written by intergenerational members of the Duryea-Remsen-Robinson families and are addressed to or written mostly by female members of these families. There is a large group of letters addressed to Mary Robinson (-1863), a teenage girl, whose wide circle of family and friends wrote to her of current events, school and social life, and their currents boyfriends. Sadly, Mary Robinson was in ill health and died in her teens.

The collection contains extensive business accounts for the general store and mercantile business owned by the Duryea brothers, as well as their other business interests. Also included are legal papers consisting of wills, indentures, bonds, promissory notes, warrants, and court business related to the work of Stephen Duryea as a Justice of the Peace. This includes charges of rape, bastardy, and default on loans.

Another aspect of the collection is the frequent references to enslaved persons owned by the Duryea family, as well as the many named enslaved persons of other families in the Hudson Valley who were customers at the Duryea's general store in Fishkill, New York. There are also documents involving legal cases, as well as documents relating to the sale of enslaved persons.

This collection is an important archive covering the colonial, Revolutionary, early Republic, and Civil War eras in New York state, as well as business, social, political, and women's history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.