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Niles, Mich. businessman and officer in the Sixth and Nineteenth Michigan Infantry regiments during the Civil War. Includes correspondence, diaries, and photographs related to Griffin's personal life and military service in addition to genealogical information and miscellaneous materials.

The Eli A. Griffin papers are organized into a single Personal Papers series, which includes family genealogical information, correspondence, personal diaries, photographs, military records, and other materials. The collection documents Griffin's various travels (including trips to the California gold fields in 1849 and 1853 and other trips to Iowa, Missouri, Colorado, and Utah), service in the Union army during the Civil War, and information about his family.

This collection consists of letters from a young Massachusetts girl who had recently migrated to the Nebraska frontier. She described her life in the west, encounters with Indians, and the activities of her brother, Grenville Dodge, in the Civil War.

The Julia Dodge papers hold 12 letters from the young Julia Dodge, written between 1855 and 1861, to her friend, and possibly cousin, Mary Webster. She wrote about her life on the western frontier and described the cold winters, her log cabin home, the beautiful woods and rivers close by, her studies, and her home life. She also mentioned numerous encounters with Indians including seeing them at local stores, catching them stealing food from the Dodge farm, and offering them food and clothes to trade. Other topics covered in her letters include Civil War news from her brother Grenville; the Council Bluffs Concert Hall fire of 1860; and her time with toddler Lettie Dodge, Grenville’s daughter. One letter, dated March 27, 1861, described Julia’s brief attendance at a "Young Ladies Institute" in Alexandria, Virginia, which she found pleasant, but she left the school before graduation.