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The collection includes two journals kept by Isaac Robson while traveling as a Quaker minister. One records his observations while touring France and Italy in 1864 to visit Quakers, Vaudois, and Protestants, and the other documents his trip to Canada and the United States from 1870 to 1871 to attend Quaker meetings. Seven letters, principally written by Isaac Robson to his wife Sarah while he was in America, are at the end of the collection.

The collection includes two journals kept by Isaac Robson while traveling as a Quaker minister. One records his observations while touring France and Italy in 1864 to visit with Quakers, Vaudois, and Protestants, and the other documents his trip to Canada and the United States from 1870 to 1871 to attend Quaker meetings. Seven letters, principally written by Isaac Robson to his wife Sarah while he was in America, are at the end of the collection.

The journal Isaac Robson kept while in France and Italy spans from August 20, 1864, to November 11, 1864. Robson traveled through Southern France and Italy as a Quaker minister with his colleague Charles Fox of Falmouth, visiting Quakers and attending to Vaudois (Waldenses) and Protestant congregations. Robson commented on Catholics, priests, Protestants and anti-Protestant prejudice, and general religious practice and feeling throughout the region. He distributed religious tracts and observed local customs, reflecting on labor, education, and good will engendered by the prior visit of Quaker minister William Forster. This journal includes both original manuscript writings and carbon copies in different hands, with some variance in content.

Robson's American journal is a carbon copy, beginning as he boarded the Java in May 1870, headed to New York for a tour of Canadian and American Quaker meetings, and ending upon his arrival in Philadelphia at the end of March 1871. Robson's itinerary took him through New England, portions of Southern Canada, several mid-Western states, including Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, and the border states of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Robson's principal object was to visit Quaker meetings, attending both isolated local meetings and larger Yearly Meetings. He frequently visited Friends' schools and commented extensively on local Quakers' lifestyles, labor, and religious practices. Robson visited with Wilburite and Hicksite meetings and reflected on the persisting schisms in American Quakerism.

While passing through Canada, Robson described frontier communities, Canadian attitudes toward England and the United States, and social and religious practices. He included three small drawings of a "shanty," a "Log house," and a "Frame house" to illustrate dwellings in southern Ontario (page 33). In the United States, Robson's interest in social matters drew his attention to African Americans, Native Americans, women, religious revivalism, schools, and penitentiary systems.

Robson commented on his encounters with African Americans and Quakers' interactions with them throughout his tour. He regularly wrote about African American religion, education, labor, and changing relationships in the South between planters and those they formerly enslaved. While in Arkansas, he visited with Friends Calvin and Alida Clark, and he discussed their work with African Americans at the Southland College and the white community's hostile reactions to them (pages 119-122). Throughout his journal Robson also noted the lasting physical, social, and economic impacts of the Civil War.

Robson mentioned information about the Quaker's Indian Affairs Committee and other Quaker involvement with Native Americans (pages 89 and 22), and he also wrote passing details relating to North American Indians in general. He included a sketch of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, "so called from its having been used as a guiding mark by the Indians" (page 100). While in Iowa, Robson visited Lawrie Tatum (1822-1900), a Quaker Indian agent to the Kiowa and Comanche at Fort Sill, and he recorded some of Tatum's reflections on Native American civilization, religion, and morality (pages 55, 129, 131).

Other notable figures encountered or discussed by Robson include: Clinton B. Fisk (1828-1890) of the Freedmen's Bureau (page 6); John Parker Hale (1806-1873), U.S. minister to Spain (page 7); Joseph Gould (1808-1886), Canadian political figure (page 39); Anna Dickinson (1842-1932), orator, abolitionist, and women's rights advocate (page 157); William Forster (1784-1854), British Quaker abolitionist buried in Tennessee (pages 79, 112, 117, 140); George Dixon and Alfred Jones, superintendents of a Freedmen school in Danville, Virginia (pages 96, 98); Yardley Warner (1815-1885), Quaker who founded Warnersville, a free black community (pages 98, 113); and Daniel Drew, a former slave who attended the Southland Institute and became a Quaker minister in Arkansas (pages 119-121).

The loose correspondence consists of seven letters, six written from Isaac Robson to his wife Sarah Robson during his American tour, 1870-1871, with reflections on Reconstruction, Quaker meetings, prisons, and other topics. One letter from William Harvey to Joshua Wheeler Robson written from Leeds, England, in 1885 mentions financial charity for immigrant Mennonites.

The Downs papers include documents relating to Levi Downs' military service with the 107th United States Colored Troops, materials from Downs' work as clerk to the Claims Agent for the Plymouth, N.C branch of the Freedmen's Bureau, and family correspondence from and to Downs.

The Downs papers include three sorts of materials: first, correspondence between Levi Downs and his sisters Louisa, Mary, Nancy, and Ann (Mrs. E.W. Frost); second, materials relating to claims for bounty money and pay in arrears, all handled by Downs as clerk to the Claims Agent for the local branch of the Freedmen's Bureau between December, 1868 and December, 1869; and finally, documents relating to Downs' military service, including commissions and returns. Downs' diary includes only very sporadic entries during 1864, and these very brief. They do include notes on both Drewry's Bluff and Cold Harbor-Petersburg.

Downs' letters to his sisters provide comparatively little information on the military side of the war, although there are some good letters written while he was serving with the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery describing the siege at Yorktown, and some descriptions of life on the Richmond front when with the 107th U.S.C.T. His post-war letters provide a case study of the attempts of a Union veteran to establish himself in tough economic times by taking advantage of business opportunities in the occupied south. His record, unfortunately, is one of very limited success. An excellent and very long letter from another officer in the 107th U.S.C.T., E.T. Lamberton (1882 August 17-25), suggests that Downs' economic hardships and inability to capitalize on the Reconstruction economy were not unique. Lamberton details his own efforts at making a living and relates news he has heard from of the hard times faced by several other of their fellow officers.

The series of bounty claims and claims for arrears in pay, dated between December, 1868 and December, 1869, includes letters written by and on behalf of veterans of "Colored" regiments, including the 14th Heavy Artillery, the 35th, 36th, 37th and 38th U.S.C.T. (all but the 38th raised in North Carolina), and the 1st and 2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry. The majority of these letters are routine inquiries written on behalf of former soldiers by pension agents, friends or surviving relatives, though several letters addressed to Oliver Otis Howard (and forwarded) appear to have been written by the veterans themselves. One letter, from Marcus Hamilton, a Private in Downs' Company during the war, is a request for support in an application for a pension for having been wounded at Fair Oaks in October, 1864. Downs complied.

An unusual assortment of materials is associated with the Downs papers. Included are a pair of Down's spectacles, his sword as an officer of the 107th U.S.C.T., a Civil War-era gutta percha ball, which may have been the core to an early baseball, his military belt buckle, a match case, a $20 Confederate bill and $2 bill from the Citizen's bank of Waterbury, and reunion ribbons for the 14th and 15th annual reunions of Companies I and B of the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery (1884 and 1885). These have all been transferred to the Graphics Division for storage. There are two photographs of Downs, a small one on a calling card with the notation, 4th Conn. Vols., and an outstanding daguerreotype in an oval thermoplastic cameo case, taken while an officer in the 107th U.S.C.T. These have also been transferred to the Graphics Division.