Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Manuscripts
Benham, Calhoun and Nathaniel Bennett, 1818-1886. 1 letter to William Maume
- Description
- 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).
