Collections : [University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library]

Family of Delos A. Blodgett, his son John W. Blodgett, and his grandson John W. Blodgett, Jr., residents of Grand Rapids, Michigan and owners of a series of logging companies active in Michigan, Mississippi, California, Oregon, and Vancouver Island. Correspondence, journals, cash books, ledgers, and maps of family businesses, including the Blodgett Company, Wright-Blodgett Company, Michigan-California Lumber Company, Michigan Timber Company, Hill-Davis Company, and Tidewater Timber Company; also personal correspondence and photographs.

The collection, although still largely unprocessed, has been grouped into different kinds of records. These include correspondence, business records, maps, and photographs.

Publishers of the Hastings Banner; financial records.

The records of the firm are exclusively financial and include cash books, advertising books, job books, ledgers, an inventory, and monthly statements of accounts.

Dansville, Michigan, general store. Ledgers, daybooks, cash books, and other business records.

The record group includes business day books, ledgers, cashbooks, stock purchases and inventories, and collection books. Some of the records were maintained by E. Rice. It is not clear if these were accounts for a separate firm or whether these were earlier records for a predecessor general store.

Grand Rapids, Michigan businessman and politician; correspondence, business papers; scrapbooks, and photographs.

The Frank D. McKay collection is divided into the following series: Correspondence; Topical Files; Business and financial papers; Newspaper clippings and scrapbooks; and Photographs.

Great Lakes ship captain; correspondence, logbooks, payroll books, and a scrapbook.

The collection includes correspondence, reminiscences, and scrapbook of clippings largely concerning Great Lakes shipping, particularly Johnson's work for the Morton Salt Company. Logbooks, cashbook, and time and payroll books detail the operation of the Steamer Covalt. There are also a few photographs.

Alpena, Michigan, family; correspondence, letterpress books, financial papers, and other material largely relating to the family's business enterprises in lumbering, sugar manufacturing, ferry and excursion lines, mining, and banking; contain record of business affairs in Alpena, Michigan, and other areas of northern Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Oregon, and Mississippi; family members represented in the collection include Frank W. Gilchrist and two of his sons, Frank R. and Ralph Gilchrist, also members of a related Fletcher and Potter families.

The Gilchrist Family Papers, which date from 1867 to 1945, reflect the business life of four generations of a prominent Alpena, Michigan family. The lives of four generations of Gilchrists are documented by the collection, but the bulk pertains primarily to Frank W. Gilchrist and his son, Ralph. Included in the collection is an assortment of correspondence, financial statements, inventories, reports, and cost estimates, pertaining to the lumbering, sugar beet, shipping, and mining industries.

The collection contains a considerable amount of material pertaining to Michigan business history, especially in the areas of lumbering, shipping, cement, and mining industries. Among the papers are financial statements, profit and loss records, invoices, lists of timber prices, salary records, blueprints of milling operations, and correspondence. They provide a documentary record of a family-owned business, which, when faced with declining lumber sales in northern Michigan, attempted to diversify its holdings in the real estate, mining, shipping, and sugar beet industries. Some of these endeavors proved successful for the Gilchrists; others did not. The papers record both the family's successes and failures.

Particularly useful for this study are the correspondence and financial statements of Frank W. Gilchrist and the early papers of his son, Ralph. The collection includes records of the Huron Sugar Company, the Alpena Portland Cement Company, and the Gilchrist Transportation Company, all of which failed to produce sufficient profit for the Gilchrists. The lumber and land companies were more successful.

The collection also serves to document the manner in which Ralph Gilchrist, Frank's son, carried the family industries into the 1920s and 1930s, managing to survive the effects of the Great Depression. The collection contains year by year, and in some cases month by month, financial statements, showing Gilchrist assets before, during. and after the stock market crash of October, 1929. The records of Gilchrist & Company Limited, the Detroit Trust Company; and Commonwealth Securities Incorporated are especially valuable for this study.

The Gilchrist Papers are not particularly useful for social history or for information on the family's private life. The collection does contain a travel diary of William H. Potter, dated 1883, in which a journey from Alpena to Detroit is described, but the bulk of the material reflects only the Gilchrists' official business functions. Correspondence usually relates information on stock acquisition, land purchases, lumber sales, and estate liquidation. The Potter papers are perhaps more personal in nature, containing some correspondence between the elder Albert Gilchrist and his daughter Ella, but these letters are few.

The researcher interested in Michigan business history, however, will find the collection useful for the above-named industries. Moreover, the collection also provides evidence for changes that took place from the 19th to 20th centuries within the office itself and the manner in which business was conducted. To some extent the papers reflect how the family reacted to early forms of office automation, as for example complaints that secretaries make too many typographical errors and that it is often easier to write letters by hand.

The collection remains in excellent condition, for the most part, although the letterpress books from the 19th century are faded and nearly illegible.

Gladwin, Michigan family. The collection consists of diaries, account books, and family miscellanea.

The Hanna family collection consists of the diaries and account books generated by various members of the Hanna family of Gladwin, Michigan. Isaac Hanna's diaries comment on his business dealings and activities as a town official. They were transcribed by Esther Munster, daughter of Isaac's son Will, who also provided the biographical information incorporated in this introduction.

Family of Burke A. Hinsdale, professor of education at the University of Michigan and president of Hiram College. The collection contains the papers of Burke Hinsdale and the papers of his three daughters, Mary Louise, Ellen Clarinda, and Mildred. Materials include correspondence, diaries, and photographs.

The Hinsdale family papers consist of material from Burke A. Hinsdale and his three daughters Mary, Ellen, and Mildred. The collection contains correspondence, journals, photographs, and other materials documenting the personal and professional lives of the Hinsdale family.

Some of the correspondents represented in the collection include Randolph G. Adams, John R. Alden, James B. Angell, Denis W. Brogan, Nicholas M. Butler, Donald J. Cawling, William E. Dodd, Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Albert B. Hart, Anne O'Hare McCormick, Alice Freeman Palmer, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, and Charles Sumner.

Grand Rapids, Michigan businessman and Republican politician. Correspondence, business records, speeches, and other papers relating to state politics, charitable and civic interests, banking issues, the Grand Rapids Varnish Corporation, the Michigan Trust Company of Grand Rapids, and the Ypsilanti-Reed Furniture Company of Ionia, Michigan; also materials on Albion College, the Methodist Church, the Ionia Free Fair, and Republican Party politics, especially the campaign of Arthur H, Vandenberg for the presidency in 1940.

The collection documents the business, civic, and political interests of Howard C. Lawrence. The series in the collection are: Correspondence; Speeches and speech material; Financial; Business Interests; Charitable and Civic Interests; Clippings; Miscellaneous; Photographs; and Notebooks.

Records of railroad companies, mainly Michigan lines, absorbed with the merger of the New York Central Railroad Company and the Pennsylvania Railroad Company into the Penn Central Transportation Company.

The nature of the records of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central Railroad reflects the recent history of the two companies. When the Penn Central Transportation Company was formed in 1968, the offices of New York Central--the junior merger partner--were dismantled and only a small percentage of records retained. Therefore, the extant New York Central records consist almost entirely of minutes and account books of a routine nature. By contrast, records of the Pennsylvania Railroad were relatively undisturbed by the merger and are today richer and more varied than those of the New York Central. The Penn Central records are most useful for their documentation of the growth of the railroad industry. They depict an industry in constant flux due to the opportunities for success offered by a burgeoning industry and the intense competition among railroads that resulted. A single volume of records often contains minutes of two or more railroads, reflecting either the failure of the original company or its takeover by or merger with another company.

Besides documenting the history of individual railroads and of the railroad industry as a whole, the Penn Central records are a good source on the economic and commercial development of Michigan and neighboring states, and provide insight into the rise and decline of various towns along the railroad. Minutes of New York Central subsidiaries, for example, contain discussions of negotiations with town officials over the proposed construction of tracks, bridges, depots, and the like. Similarly, the locality files in the Superintendent--Toledo Division series of the Pennsylvania Railroad records consist of correspondence and memoranda regarding improvements to, or the abandonment of, stations in small towns in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. This series also contains substantial correspondence files on Toledo, Detroit, and Grand Rapids.

Labor and social historians will find the Penn Central records useful in illuminating the lives of workers and in documenting relations between management and workers. More than 40 feet of labor relations files of the Ann Arbor Railroad include agreements between the company and unions, grievances, petitions concerning work rules and pay, wage and hour schedules, and circular letters. There are small series of labor relations files of other companies scattered throughout the collection. Researchers will also find information on the workplace and working conditions in the locality files of the Superintendent--Toledo Division series of the Pennsylvania Railroad; these files contain, for example, memoranda concerning clubrooms and sleeping quarters for workers in city depots.

There is very little technical material in the Penn Central records; photographs are likewise scarce. The most notable exceptions are in the car ferry files, found in three subseries of the Pennsylvania Railroad records: General Manager--Western Region, Vice-President and General Counsel, and Subsidiaries: Mackinac Transportation Company. The car ferry files include maps, plans, specifications, blueprints, and some photographs.

A large portion of the collection consists of records of small railroads that ran through Michigan or were based in Michigan. Records of these companies are brief, often including nothing more than articles of incorporation, a few pages or a volume or two of minutes, and perhaps some annual reports and financial records. Although many of these railroads were subsidiaries of either the Michigan Central Railroad, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, or the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad, they have been filed under the parent company of which the sub-system was a part (New York Central, Pennsylvania, or Ann Arbor Railroad) to promote ease of access. Thus, for example, records of the Canada Southern Bridge Company, a subsidiary of Michigan Central Railroad, are filed under New York Central Railroad, the parent company of Michigan Central. Researchers uncertain of the parentage of a particular railroad should look in the subsidiaries section of the contents list under Ann Arbor, New York Central, and Pennsylvania Railroads. The railroads in each of these subsidiaries sections are arranged in alphabetical order.

Brief histories of individual railroads can be found in the "Green Books"--the annual reports of the New York Central Railroad Company and its subsidiaries. There are several published histories of the Pennsylvania Railroad in boxes 183 and boxes 155-157 and on microfilm in box 60.

A card file giving the date of incorporation, name changes, and parentage of subsidiaries of the Michigan Central Railroad, Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, and the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad has been photocopied and can be found in box 1 of the collection. This folder also contains a list of records in the Public Archives of Canada of Grand Trunk and Great Western Railway system properties in the United States. Finally, there is a section of Aids, Gifts, Grants and Donations to Railroads Including Outline of Development and Successions in Titles to Railroads in Michigan by the Michigan Railroads Commission (1919).

Information in this finding aid concerning the histories of the various railroads was drawn from the collection itself, from sources compiled by the project archivists, and from the following published sources: William Frederick Dunbar All Aboard! A History of Railroads in Michigan (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1969) and Henry E. Riggs, The Ann Arbor Railroad Fifty Years Ago (Ann Arbor Railroad Company, 1947?)