Special Collections & Archives at Wesleyan University

The World’s Fair: Being a Pictorial History of the Columbian Exposition…, published in 1893, provides a comprehensive description of the Fair and its host city, Chicago. Members of the Wesleyan community may be particularly interested in this chapter:

An inquirer asked about Laban Clark’s journal from 1807. Clark kept a number of journals. Here you see the first page of journal “No. 17,” which starts on Christmas Day. You can find a full description of the Laban Clark Papers here. From 1801 to 1851, Laban Clark was engaged in the work of the [...]

What do you think of when you see the name “Booth” on the cover of a 19th-century U.S. play?  Does the name “John Wilkes Booth” come to mind, perhaps?  I’ve been cataloging just such an item, a promptbook of the 1859 play The Octaroon. Right at the top of the cover, handwritten in ink, is [...]

As I was refiling some photographs, I came across this stereograph taken of Memorial Chapel in 1893. I’m afraid I don’t know what the event is. These cards are also called a steropticans, stereograms, or stereo views. When you look at them through a stereograph viewer (shown below), the two images merge into one 3-D [...]

A reader was interested in class albums, including this one that belonged to Charles Washburn Church, Class of 1864. In the 19th century, before there were college yearbooks, Wesleyan students assembled albums and selected the photographs they wished to include. At first, the albums consisted of portraits, but in the 1870s and 1880s, photographs of [...]

An association for the establishment of a rural cemetery in Middletown was organzied on July 3, 1850. It purchased property known as Indian Hill. The association charged Dr. Horatio Stone with laying out the grounds. The cemetery was dedicated on Sept. 30, 1850, and among the participants were the mayor, other city officials, clergymen, prominent [...]

A researcher wanted to know if SC&A holds music programs for concerts performed during the Civil War era so he could analyze the compositions played. In the Wesleyan Music Dept. Records, four such programs are found, including the one shown above.

The Great Blizzard of 1888 is legendary throughout New England, and it remains the benchmark by which all subsequent storms have been measured, including the one that will probably be known as the Blizzard of 2013.  Paralyzing the East Coast from the Canadian Maritime Provinces to the Chesapeake Bay from March 11 to 14, the [...]

A patron asked to see our first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1855.    

Our pick of the week is this 1803 insurance contract covering the schooner Resolution. A patron was interested in Benjamin Williams, then-president of the Middletown Insurance Co. At the time this document was signed, Middletown had a thriving seaport—it was one of the largest ports on the east coast—although in just a few decades, due [...]