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The Hubert S. Smith Naval Letters and Documents collection is made up of individual manuscripts relating to naval and commercial maritime operations.

The Hubert S. Smith Naval Letters and Documents collection is made up of over 380 manuscript letters and documents relating to maritime military, commercial, financial, and legal subjects from the 15th to the 20th centuries, primarily concerning Great Britain and America. The collection includes materials relating to Continental European wars, the American Revolution, the African slave trade, the Civil War, and exploratory ventures. The collection also reflects day-to-day ship operations and naval employment, diplomacy, marine technology, the purchase and sale of ships, insurance, and publications and books relating to maritime affairs. While primarily focused on English and American navies, the contributors discuss a wide variety of places, including continental Europe, the Baltic region, Russia, Asia, Turkey, South America, and Africa.

Photographs (positive and negative), slides, and transparencies taken by the company's photographers to document company activities, products, services, employees at work and at leisure, company exhibits and commemorations, and the response of the company to natural disasters and civil disturbances.

In 1993, Michigan Bell as a corporate entity was subsumed within the Ameritech Corporation. As a by-product of this reorganization and the downsizing resulting from it, the company agreed to deposit with the Bentley Historical Library its extensive archive of photographic images. Totalling approximately one million images, the Michigan Bell Telephone Company photo archive consists of negatives, copy prints, and color transparencies taken in the period since World War II (the bulk beginning in 1949). The collection does not include photos taken since 1983; interspersed throughout, however, are numerous images from before 1949.

The collection has been maintained in the order received with two principal series: Positives and Negatives.

The content of the photographs in the two series varies considerably. Naturally the collection documents the products of the company (phones and other communication devices) and the services provided (e.g. employees at work or the company reacting to a specific customer need). These photos were taken both to inform the general public as accompaniment to press notices and advertising copy and as a communications vehicle within the company, informing employees through the company news publication, Tielines, of activities going on in other divisions of the company or among the various regional Bell offices.

More importantly perhaps, the collection has value for its documentation of events and activities that are common to all large companies. These include images relating to: 1. The activities of employees within the corporation at their work (office workers, repairmen, operators, various support personnel, managers, etc.); 2. The activities of employees outside their work routine as members of corporate social groups (i.e., the company baseball or ice hockey team), at home engaged in leisure time activities, or involved in company-sponsored charitable or public service functions; and 3. Commemorations of specific milestones or events (company parade floats, area office open houses, corporate displays at public events such as fairs, etc.).

In addition, the collection documents the extraordinary and unforeseen as the phone company reacts to events and emergencies not within its control (floods, tornadoes, fires, the 1967 Detroit riot, strikes, and the like) or as a participant in history-making events (the announcement in Ann Arbor of the success of the Salk polio vaccine or the preparation involved in the 1980 Republican National Convention that convened in Detroit).

A young physician wrote most of this diary while a passenger on a voyage from Alexandria, Virginia, to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1846. Content includes humorous accounts of sailing by river and ocean, observations of sailors' superstitions (i.e., Mother Carey's Chickens, also known as Storm Petrels, St. Elmo's fire, etc.), weather and storm patterns, personal health, and patient treatment.

A young physician wrote most of this diary while a passenger on a voyage from Alexandria, Virginia, to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1846. Content includes humorous accounts of sailing by river and ocean, sailors' superstitions (i.e., Mother Carey's Chickens, also known as Storm Petrels, St. Elmo's Fire, etc.), weather and storm patterns, personal health, and patient treatment.

His humor often took the form of comical comparisons and exaggerations or plays on dialect. To entertain himself, he brought several books: Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, by William Blackstone, the Bible, and a pocket Shakespeare. He attached varying levels of reading intensity to each, as well as the applicable situation in which he might read them—Blackstone's Commentaries, for example, was "suitable for a listless, languid frame of mind" (page 6).

He brought with him two Bologna sausages, which he jokingly and emphatically mistook for a woman's bustle in an expression of his apparent hatred for the garment (pages 6-7). When he had to throw the spoiled sausages overboard several days later, he lamented that he couldn't do the same with every bustle in the land (pages 23-24).

The author and several others (the captain, a skipper, and officers from a nearby revenue cutter) briefly disembarked to visit a family's farm in Virginia while waiting for better winds to sail. He included racial epithets that the family used when he quoted their complaints about the labor involved in caring for their farm without enslaved workers (page 22). The skipper revealed that the author was a physician, whereupon he was entreated to care for several members of the family. The mother's eye had been "eaten out by cancer" and the young daughter had a hard lump on her nose that the family felt sure would turn into cancer. The author treated the daughter's nose by excising the lump.

At some point between Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, the author wrote of being "assaulted, battered, and robbed" by bedbugs, which led him to construct a makeshift bed of camp stools to sleep on to avoid being bitten at night (page 11). His rheumatism also caused significant discomfort during the trip, and a self-administered treatment of liniment did little to ease his symptoms (page 34). Although the physician questioned whether or not he would become seasick at some point during the voyage, he narrowly avoided it—he did, however, treat a fellow passenger with a course of "consolation [and] pills" (page 30) after the man became seasick and vomited over the fresh paint sailors were applying to the bulwarks and rigging.

The entries from page 46 onwards were most likely written after the author landed in Boston. He wrote about his plans to attend a series of lectures given by Prof. Agassiz [Louis Agassiz] on animal classification.

This guest book (121 pages) contains contributions from visitors to The Curtis, a summer boarding house and hotel in New Castle, New Hampshire, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book contains poetry, signatures, quotations, sketches, and watercolors, as well as 5 cyanotype photographs.

This guest book (121 pages) contains contributions from visitors to The Curtis, a summer boarding house and hotel in New Castle, New Hampshire, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The guest book contains poetry, signatures, quotations, sketches, and watercolors, as well as 5 cyanotype photographs.

Most entries are dated between 1895 and 1906; one is dated 1916. Visitors mainly stayed at The Curtis between the months of June and September, many for a month or longer. Most guests came from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and some visited from Maine, Vermont, Iowa, and California. Several guests included lines of verse alongside their signatures, including one who copied "At the Stand of the Tide," a poem by Harriet McEwan Kimball (pp. 38-39). One patron, Marie Middlekauff, signed in German (p. 33), and 2 referenced "Miss Bickford's" hospitality and cooking. A few contributors drew sketches, and 3 signed next to cyanotype photographs depicting sailboats, people at leisure, and a cat.

• Colored painting of an industrial town on a river, Alice M. Comstock, July 23, 1903 (p. 4)
• Sketch of buildings, M. L. Wood, June 1898 (p. 45)
• Sketch of a street, Alice Washington Ball, [1898] (p. 47)
• Sketch of a steamer, L. McL. King, 1898 (p. 49)
• "The Studio," sketch of a barn beside a body of water, Joseph B. Davol, (p. 51)
• "Why we tarried," sketch of a female golfer, William F. Crocker, [1899] (p. 77)
• "The presiding genius of The Curtis," sketch of an owl, Alice Prossitte Hall, [1899] (p. 83)
• "The Homestead," watercolor painting, Frederick E. Bartlett, [1899] (p. 85)
• Sketch of a planter with flowers, Thomas B. Frost et al., September 2, 1899 (p. 87)
• Sketch of a sailboat and waterfront buildings, Ethel Woods Varrell, September 17, 1899 (p. 89)
• Sketch of a young woman's head, Josephine Bruce, September 1899 (p. 91)
• Sketch of a house, Pauline McKay, October 5, 1900 (p. 101)
• "Keep Dark!," sketch of an African-American man in profile (p. 107), accompanied by poem on next page, Mr. & Mrs. F. A. Whiting, Mr. & Mrs. A. H. Hall, and Mr. & Mrs. F. Allen Whiting, September 11, 1905, pp. 106-107
• "Piscataqua Cafe," sketch of a building and pier, C. F. S. (p. 110)
• Cartoon sketch of a cowboy outside of a building, saying, "I done it!," Lionel Sherwood (pp. 112-113)
• Sketch of a sailboat on water, with waterfront buildings and factories in background, James N. Vandegrift, July 28, 1906 (p. 117)

This collection includes two journals kept by Midshipman Thomas Style while on separate patrols with the HMS Révolutionnaire, under Captain Henry Hotham.

This collection includes two journals kept by Midshipman Thomas Style while on separate patrols with the HMS Révolutionnaire, under Captain Henry Hotham (1777-1833).

The first journal (64 pages) covers tours of the HMS Révolutionnaire from April 16, 1804, through November 11, 1804. Style provided daily logs of the crew's activities and ship movements as they made multiple patrols. He recorded work performed at Portsmouth, Spithead, St. Helen's, and Cork, to maintain the ship and assemble crews for their voyage. The HMS Révolutionnaire departed on June 26, 1804, and patrolled along the Portuguese coast, returning to Spithead on August 15, 1804, carrying with them Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773-1843). Departing again on September 5, the crew continued to patrol the coast of Spain and Funchal, Madeira. They then made a transatlantic voyage, mooring at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in November 1804. Throughout the journal Style noted punishments doled out to sailors for various offences, weather, navigational and sailing details, and sightings of other British navy and mercantile ships. He logged ships they encountered and boarded and noted their ports of departure and arrival, including Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, England, the Caribbean, and the United States.

The second journal (76 pages) covers the HMS Révolutionnaire's patrols from July 1, 1805 to March 18, 1806, commencing as the ship passed near Lizard Point, England. Much like the first journal, Style recorded weather and navigational bearings, ship maintenance, discipline meted out to sailors, and ships encountered and boarded. The Révolutionnaire sailed along the French coast before returning to Plymouth on August 21. They set sail again on September 4 to patrol the French and Spanish coasts. Style mentioned privateers and the capture of prizes. He also described the Battle of Cape Ortegal between the English squadron and four French ships on November 4 and 5, 1805, with the Révolutionnaire and the Phoenix taking possession of the French ship Scipion. They took the prizes and prisoners back to Plymouth on November 10 before heading out nine days later to reconnoiter the enemy's position at Ferrol, Spain, the and patrol the coasts of France, Spain, and Portugal. They returned to Plymouth on March 9, 1806. Style disciplined several men for "concealing mutinous Practices & Designs" and two others for writing a disrespectful letter to the Commissioners of the Admiralty concerning Captain Henry Hotham.