Library Company of Philadelphia Mca MSS 025 Mcallister
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Library Company of Philadelphia McA MSS 025 McALLISTER MISCELLANEOUS MANUSCRIPTS 1683‐1872 5.75 linear feet, 10 boxes April 2007 McA MSS 025 2 Descriptive Summary Repository Library Company of Philadelphia 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107‐5698 Call Number McA MSS 025 Creator McAllister, John A. (John Allister), 1822‐1896. Title McAllister Miscellaneous Manuscripts Inclusive Dates 1683‐1872 Quantity 5.75 linear feet (10 boxes) Language of Materials Materials are in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. Abstract A collection of miscellaneous and individual papers including personal and business correspondence, and government, legal and financial documents, etc., most of which bear no relation to each other. They were assembled by the antiquarian collector John A. McAllister. Administrative Information Restrictions to Access The collection is open to researchers. It is on deposit at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and should be accessed through the Society’s reading room at 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA. Visit their website, http://www.hsp.org/, for reading room hours. Acquisition Information Gift of John A. McAllister; forms part of the McAllister Collection. Processing Information The McAllister Miscellaneous Manuscripts were rehoused and described 2006 under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the William Penn Foundation. The collection was processed by Sandra Markham. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this finding aid do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Preferred Citation This collection should be cited as: [indicate specific item or series here], McAllister Miscellaneous Manuscripts (McA MSS 025), McAllister Collection, The Library Company of Philadelphia. For permission to publish materials or images in this collection, contact the Coordinator of Rights and Reproductions, Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust St., Philadelphia, PA 19107‐5698. Please include McA MSS 025 3 complete citation(s) when making a request. See the Library Company’s website, http://www.librarycompany.org/, for further information. Online Catalog Headings Subject Names Dohrman, Arnold Henry, 1749‐1813 Kneass, William, 1780‐1840 Campbell, Quintin, 1774‐1863 Mitchell, John Kearsley, 1793‐1858 Montgomery, James, 1771‐1854 Caraccioli, Louis‐Antoine, marquis, 1719‐1803 Smollett, Tobias George, 1721‐1771 Subject Topics Merchants‐‐Pennsylvania‐‐Philadelphia Yellow fever‐‐Pennsylvania‐‐Philadelphia‐‐History18th century‐‐Sources Document Types Letters Bills of lading Bonds (legal records) Family papers Indentures Inventories Invoices Passports Bank notes Certificates Legal documents Related Collections Several hundred clipped signatures were filed throughout the pre‐2005 McAllister Manuscript Collection; they were extracted and assembled into their own alphabetically arranged McAllister Autograph Collection (McA MSS 022). Biographical/Historical Notes The papers in this collection are what remain of the McAllister Manuscript Collection, formerly a miscellany of letters and documents spanning the years 1683 to 1877, and which have been in the possession of the Library Company of Philadelphia since the late nineteenth century. Originally eighty‐three boxes of individual papers filed in chronological order, the collection was dismantled in 2005 after a survey found that most of the papers could be separated out into discrete collections based on original provenance. During the project, the McAllister Manuscript Collection was sorted into more than twenty‐five collections ranging from the records of McA MSS 025 4 institutions such as the Bank of the United States (2.09 linear feet) to the Philadelphia merchant firms of Watson and Paul (2.5 linear feet) and John B. Budd (2.3 linear feet). Also found in the collection were groups of personal papers, and an important set of early records of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. After these cohesive papers were removed and processed as separate collections, the remaining material became the McAllister Miscellaneous Manuscripts: approximately 1800 pieces of paper which bear no relationship to each other except in a very few cases, some of which are described below. McAllister’s strategy in assembling the manuscript collection is unknown, but it is possible that he was interested in the signatures on the papers rather than in their specific content. There are numerous examples in the collection of documents inscribed by McAllister to identify the signatory; they exist here as well as in many of the other collections separated out. In one particular case found here, a group letter of recommendation for Jacob Zelby (in folder 7345.F.25) that had been sent to Philadelphia’s Mayor Michael Keppele has several signatures clipped off. McAllister wrote on the verso of the letter the names of five prominent men whose names still remain (including Horace Binney, Richard Rush, and John Barker) suggesting that those names were meant to be clipped from the document as well. Other similar examples abound: he inscribed an 1830 letter by Joseph M. White (7379.F.33) “J.M. White delegate from Florida Territory 1823‐1837 to Congress;” a one‐page legal notice signed by Joseph Hopkinson (7321.F.34) was annotated along the lower edge, “author of “Hail Columbia;” a short note from Charles Francis Adams (7381.F.63) is labeled “Minister at London;” and an 1822 letter from James Mease (7363.F.44) to the inspectors of the Philadelphia prison was labeled “antiquarian & author of The Picture of Phila.” Other pieces have notes that provide the sort of information that underscores McAllister’s own antiquarian bent: an 1831 letter to W.W. Corcoran of Georgetown, MD, from Margaret Meade (7360.F.67) was inscribed by McAllister, “mother of General George G. Meade.” There are, in addition, many incidental documents such as single bank checks, promissory notes, and the like which, having been disassociated from their original context, had retained much of their value in their autographs. A few of the items in the collection also bear evidence of acquisition, such as the set letters of administration addressed to Martha Dean in 1763 regarding her husband’s estate (7307.F.74 and 75): they are inscribed on the verso: “Presented to Mr John A McAlister [sic] by L. Mendenhall, Doylestown, Pa February 21, 1863.” Collection Overview The McAllister Miscellaneous Manuscripts are true to their name: the material is wide ranging in form and disparate in subject. It is a collection of personal and business correspondence, and government, legal and financial documents, which generally bear no relation to each other except for their largely Philadelphia‐centric content. The papers are generally (but not precisely) filed in a chronological order established by the Library Company staff in the late nineteenth‐ century. Therefore, the box and folder list that follows is a simple inventory of the material with McA MSS 025 5 a précis of the subject matter and a date. The papers are predominantly manuscripts, but there are some printed items, particularly forms, in the collection; these are indicated by an asterisk [*] in the column to the right of the item number. As with the chronological filing system, the numbering msyste for these documents remains as it was imposed in the late 1890s: the four‐digit number (i.e. 7334) represents a former box number, and the sub‐number represents the assigned document number (which includes an .F for folio). Together, they make a unique identification number for each document, and should be employed by readers when filling out call slips; i.e. McA MSS 025 folder 7323.F.43 would request a pair of printed summonses from 1797 for the arrest and detainment of Robert Morris. The papers are filed in order by their document numbers with one exception: the oversize item 7307.F.77, a set of pages containing extracts from the Customs House books that describe exports from Philadelphia during the period 1759‐1763, is housed in a separate box (10) at the end of the collection. The items attached to document numbers absent from this finding aid are now part of other McAllister manuscript collections. Within the collection there are a few related documents, though due to the chronological organization, they are not filed together as a group. They range in size from the more than twenty‐five letters and documents relating to the Collector of the Port of Philadelphia, primarily letters of recommendation for staff appointments in the collector’s office in 1861, to the ten folders with items related to expenses of the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812, mainly payroll and provisions, and the three documents dating 1852‐1855 from Farrell v Barrington, a court case over a patent for steam boilers. There are also small groupings of documents, again not filed together, relating to specific men. One is Daniel Pegg, for whom there are nearly a dozen items including a copy of his will, and ranging in date from 1683‐1734. Another example is Arnold Henry Dohrman, a merchant, importer and ship owner who lived in Portugal during the American Revolution and aided American seamen abandoned there by the British in that period; the four Dohrman documents date from the early 1780s through 1804. There are property surveys (for three houses and the New Theatre) made by carpenter and engineer Philip Justus in 1804 and 1805. Another small grouping of papers is the three items for the Whigs of Walnut Ward, consisting of a receipt for advertising