Prudence Ward and Anne J. Ward Correspondence

The collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, drawings, and photographs of the Ward and Thoreau families of Massachusetts. The correspondence consists of letters to Prudence Ward from Sophia, Maria, and Helen Thoreau and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn's letters to Anne J. Ward (1905, some with enclosed manuscripts). Also included are individual letters by Harrison Gray Otis Blake, Edmund Quincy Sewall, and George Washington Ward. The letters discuss the Alcott family, Mary Merrick Brooks, Lidian Jackson Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and the Thoreau family; American Antislavery Society, Cherokee Nation, Southworth & Hawes daguerreotypes, family affairs, social news, etc. Also included are drawings by Sophia E. Thoreau and Prudence Ward and photographs of places and people connected with the Thoreau family and Prudence Ward. The collection contains two pages of proofs of F. B. Sanborn's First and last journeys of Thoreau (1905), his lecture to the Emerson Society, and a typescript of his essay "The Women of Concord." The photographs within the collection all deal with places or people influential to both the Thoreaus and Prudence Ward. The collection also contains 4 folders of ephemera.

The drawings, photographs and letters to Prudence Ward were originally pasted into a scrapbook. The scrapbook has been disbound and the items interfiled with the rest of the collection. Before it was disbound, digital images were taken of each page in order to preserve the way the scrapbook was originally created. The original scrapbook binding is housed in the last box of this collection. Along with it is the binder that held the correspondence and manuscripts by F. B. Sanborn.