Search

William Coalman served in the 6th Regiment of North Carolina Troops in the army of the Confederate States of America. Howell A. Curtis served in this regiment as well. Coalman was married to Elizabeth Curtis, sister of Howell A. Curtis and daughter of Madison Curtis, the recipient of the letter.

Thomas Casey (died 1847), a native of South Carolina, was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in 1834. The collection includes a letter from Casey to Marien Passage in Mobile, Ala., describing his situation as a new cadet at the United States Military Academy.

Smith Thompson (1768-1843) was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court and United States Secretary of the Navy.

Stephen Elliott was an Episcopal bishop of Georgia (1840; and provisional bishop of Florida (1844). He died at Savannah, Ga., 1866.

William Bagley was a white college student who attended the University of North Carolina in the 1840s. The collection consists of two volumes containing handwritten copies Bagley made of letters he sent to family and friends, chiefly while he was a student at the University of North Carolina, 1843-1845, and when he related local news from Plymouth and Williamston, N.C., 1845-1850. Also included is a transcription of an acrostic poem composed by George Moses Horton, a Black poet who was enslaved by the Horton family of Chatham County, N.C.

William Courtney and Major William O'Neel were in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. They were taken as prisoners of war by forces led by Lord Cornwallis, possibly in North Carolina during the summer of 1780.

The collection is a letter from Mary Clay (1766-1803), a teenage girl in Camden, S.C., to her sister Anne (Nancy) Clay in Savannah, Ga., with a description of a dance she attended and a brief reference to the British occupation of Charleston, S.C.

The collection is a letter, dated February 1865 but according to an accompanying note actually written "many years" after that, from Julia Lee to Mrs. J. Hardy Lee, describing the burning of Columbia, S.C., in February 1865.

Nathan Rumsey (fl. 1777) was a courier of messages from the Continental Congress. The collection is a copy of a letter, 8 March 1777, from Nathan Rumsey in Paris, France, where he had helped carry dispatches from the Continental Congress, to his father, William Rumsey in Cecil County, Md., commenting on the arrival at Nantes of a packet ship bearing dispatches from Congress, on the sale of ships captured as prizes, and on French-British relations.

The collection contains two handwritten copies and a typed transcription of a letter dated 17 June 1880 from G.W. Michal to William S. Pearson. Based on information gathered from longtime residents of Burke County, N.C., the letter describes and differentiates between Joseph McDowell (1756-1801) and Joseph McDowell (1758-1799), both of whom were Revolutionary War officers and United States congressman. Both men also died in Burke County, N.C.