The Concept of Property

Since the completion of processing last week, I have had the chance to go back through previously processed series to tweak the finding aid description. This has also included the exciting task of numbering each folder, now that we are sure there are no more documents lurking around to be added.

I started looking at Series 3, Samuel Chew (1737-1809), beginning with his account records. Throughout those files, I found many receipts that mentioned slaves from his plantations in Maryland. He owned five plantations, from all the accounts I have seen: Frisby's Meadows, the Great Plantation, Rich Neck, Swan Point, and Veazey Farm. All of them seem to have been located in Cecil County, Maryland, and there appear to have been 100+ slaves who lived on these farms. In the account records, there are bills from doctors who attended to "the people," as they are often called in the papers. There are many mentions of midwives, and lists of various medical treatments provided (usually the Latin names for herbs and compounds made into tinctures, pastes, and other preparations).

Some of the most detailed records about the enslaved people on Samuel Chew's farms are from the inventories of his estate after his death in 1809. Every time I look at these kinds of records, I am struck by the fact that people's lives were given monetary value, based on their age, their physical ability, and other factors. There is something about seeing these lists of property that really drives home the view of slaveholders, making it clear how they could continue to own other human lives and profit from their trade.


These pages are from an inventory registered in 1812. It lists all of the slaves who belonged to Samuel Chew's estate. They are listed by name, with the name of the person to whom they were sold and the price for which they were purchased.

These inventories provide extensive details about how the Chews lived. For instance, in one inventory, the total value of the estate is listed as $42800.10, which in today's dollars would be over 3/4 of a million dollars. There are lines in these inventories that detail all types of property, including meat, sugar, fabric, and other common items.

In the inventory below, Benjamin Chew Jr., who serves as the executor of Samuel's estate, lists "Eight single rose blankets, which as the black people on the Farms in Cecil were in want of bed clothing have been delivered unto those who needed it. (value: $16.00)"; and later, "1460 lbs. Bacon Sent from Chester Town to the Farms in Cecil where the black people were out of meat except what was reserved for the use of the family remaining at Chester Town + Except 25 hams sent to the residuary legatees in Philadelphia. (value: $183.50)

On the second page shown here, Benjamin describes some of the slaves: "For the Negro man named Dick, who being very sickly has been permitted under the discretion given to the Executor in the Will, to go at large, hiring himself when he is able to work & liable to be maintained out of the Estate when he shall be too infirm to take care of himself appraised at $75.00." The next entry is even more wrenching: "For a child Called Harriett who died $5 a grey horse that died early in Summer 70$"


This collection is full of documents like these, and I imagine that these documents could open up a lot of doors for African-American genealogists, as well as scholars who are interested in the history of slavery in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Milestones

We have gone from this..............................................to This!

I never thought I would be able to say this, but today, we are done with processing! Every document has a home in a neatly-labeled folder--all the horror of the unexpected 50 linear feet of material in the stacks has abated, and now we get down to the nitty-gritty work of polishing our finding aid, numbering all the folders, making labels, marking up the finding aid, creating catalog records, writing our reports to NEH, and cleaning up data. Of course, there is still much to be done, but today feels like a very good day.

Leah and Jessica rolled up the last of the oversize maps today, and now there are a few lingering oversize folders to deal with, but all of this feels so much more manageable. I am buoyed by these accomplishments, and feel readier than ever to face the last month and a half of the project with energy and a clear head.

Just wanted to share this day with you all!
(Even the water leaking from the ceiling can't upset me today!)

We're on a Roll...

Avid blog followers may remember this post from back in August of 2008... Those oversized maps and documents that we unrolled for the first time so many months ago are finally receiving conservation treatment!

The rolled documents arrived to HSP housed in long plastic bags, tied at both ends with cotton tape.

Each document is removed from the bag, slowly unrolled and weights are used to hold the document open.

Most of the maps are covered with a layer of dust, soot, and dirt that is removed with vulcanized rubber erasers and Nilfisk vaccuum.

The documents are rolled around 4" diameter acid-free, lignen-free archival tubes with a layer of Microchamber paper and an outer layer of Tyvek. The tube is cut to size for each document using a hacksaw and then sanded smooth.

Cotton tape is used to secure the Tyvek around the rolled document. The newly-housed documents will be labeled and stored on shelves.

I will explain about the "heavy religious messages"

One of the good things about the latest find of material has been the addition of information about later generations of the Chew family. The boxes we are in the process of adding contain materials related to the children of Samuel Chew (d. 1887). In addition to all of the office files that document the management of the family's estates and property, there are personal letters from Elizabeth B. Chew, Anne S.P. (Chew) Alston, Oswald Chew, Samuel Chew Jr. and others. In one envelope, there were a series of "messages" that looked like correspondence. I put them into the batch to be processed with Samuel Chew Jr.'s papers.

Last week, I was looking through the collection folders to try to find the original deed of gift, and I came across a bunch of inventories that proved to be very informative. In one of these inventories, there was a note about a group of messages from Samuel Chew Jr. that were written through the aid of a medium. When I asked Willhem if he had run across them, he said "Oh, that's what those were!" He had put them aside to see if they made sense in the context of the rest of Samuel's materials.

In a series of messages from 1920-1924, the Chew siblings attempted to contact their deceased brother Samuel Chew Jr. through a medium named Mrs. Duane. There are eight total communications, some of which read as sermons; others are more like question and answer sessions. In the first message, Samuel Chew addresses his friend John Ingram.

"Well, old man, here I am in the world of spirits + quite alive + able to sit up + take notice, + believe me, dear John, there is something to see. I am not very high up in heaven being, as you know, quite an old sinner on earth, but still I am not in the very lowest place as I had a few virtues, among them that of Loving not wisely but too well." He goes on to talk about his regrets and all of the things he has learned since his passage to the world of spirits. He also conveys pithy advice to his friend: "...use all the rest of your earth life for the good of mankind, forget yourself, your feelings, your loves, your hates in universal service for that is the only thing that Counts over here." (May 20, 1920)


In a later (undated) message, Samuel speaks directly to Oswald (who transmits the message to his sister Anne in the form of a letter). The messages have a pretty weighty tone to them, infused with the humor that Samuel Chew exhibited in his letters while he was alive.

The message to Oswald reads as instruction: "Oswald, old man, buck up about everything. I am the most alive of all of you, though so very well buried....You are really the pick of our bunch, though you thought I was. You are still young, as the world goes for a man, and I am proud of you, especially your war work. Now is your chance however to carry on, for never in the history of the world was there such a need of men. You have a lot more in you than you know and I am going to help bring it out.... I am ashamed that our generation of Chews should go down so unhonored, when the world needs us so much, and having made rather a mess of it myself, I am all the more anxious to see you make good....go slow, be sure where you go, and go straight."
Oswald closes the letter to Anne by saying that he read the message to their mother, who seemed glad to have seen it, but didn't believe in such things. He also notes that he will "explain about the heavy religious messages."



All of the messages attempt to relay to their recipients how important it is for them to do good things on earth, and explaining the way of things in the spirit world. In the third or fourth message, dated June 13, 1922, Samuel speaks once again to his brother Oswald. He gets deeper into explanations about "life everlasting, as we call it here...."

"It did not take me long to see I had made a lot of mistakes + no end of a mess of things on earth. I cannot very well go into details, but I want to say this, --that no one who does anything they know is wrong gets away with it here. One pays always.
Well, in some ways being a decent sort, I was not obliged to herd with the greatest sinners, but they were not as picked a group as the Philadelphia Club thinks it is. By the way, that is no criterion over here. Nothing counts but character--what you are....
I woke up here to my real self, I was a little upset + my first idea was 'Help me to keep others from these pitfalls," + that saved me. The desire to save others literally saved my life from depths I don't like to think about. So they keep me busy + I am right on the job. Day after day I help bring people out of Hell."



These messages are really interesting examples of spiritualism in the United States, and show a more personal side of the children of Samuel Chew.

"It's funny how things never turn out the way you had them planned..."*

A few weeks ago now, I was feeling pretty good about the progress of the Chew Papers processing project. We had just reported to NEH that we had only 8-10 linear feet to process, and I was finally able to really imagine the project being finished. I was nearly finished with the last large series of papers, and expecting processing to be completed by early May. And then, everything changed. (Okay, so I'm being quite dramatic here, but that is definitely how it felt.)

Matthew walked into the processing room and told me that they had found some Chew materials in the stacks while surveying, and wanted to show them to me. He kept an optimistic tone, but I just knew that it wasn't good. He showed me these stacks (three full shelf sections, floor to ceiling), and my heart sunk. How did I overlook these materials??

Now, nearly empty... two weeks ago, full

I had never laid eyes on these boxes, despite the fact that they were only two rows away from the rest of the collection. Though it doesn't matter much now how they didn't make it into my original processing plan, they weren't in it, and so I felt pretty overwhelmed by the idea that they somehow all needed to get processed in the next month and half. After a lot of tears and an afternoon of personal reflection on my skills as a project manager, I dove in and figured out what needed to go where and considered how it might get done and by whom. Luckily, we've got a wonderful team here, and pretty much everyone in the archives division is now working on processing the last few series. Most of the material is related to the Chew Estate Office, which operated (from approximately the 1890s-1960s) to manage the finances, legal matters, and property transactions of various members of the Chew and Brown families. The papers cover the management of the family's many properties and the settlement of estates, primarily, but also document the donation of the Chew Family Papers to the Historical Society, among other topics.

There are some items in this new group of materials that have made the entire find worth it--like the handwritten list in the back of a volume related to the proceedings of the Benjamin Chew estate, which details how all of the records at Cliveden were stored. I called Matthew and told him that it felt like I had found the Rosetta Stone of the Chew collection. It lists the location of each group of materials, and offers a brief inventory of the contents of each packet. In many ways, this list is the archivists' dream...offering an actual glimpse into how the papers were stored and used.



Series X. Samuel Chew, Estates; Court Proceedings in the Estate of B. Chew (1844-1863)

It reminded me, too, that there are many other detailed inventories done by various family members over the years in our collection files. All of these items provide a real wealth of information for writing up the background and processing notes. The fact that so many people--family members, lawyers, archivists, and others--have sorted through these papers makes them incredibly interesting as a group, as well as sometimes quite frustrating. There are papers that clearly are part of the same group scattered all over the collection, but it has not always been obvious until we've gone through about 10 series!

After two weeks of working hard on this new group of papers, I am left with one cart of material that needs to be integrated into previous series, and a bunch of miscellaneous groups of documents that will likely fall into the "Other Family Members" series.

What's left to integrate into existing series

Today, while talking to some visitors from another institution, I found myself laughing at the absurdity of it all. Somehow, with the help of a lot of supportive colleagues, we are getting through this seeming-crisis. I hope that we will emerge at the end of July with a collection that is well-described, accessible to researchers, and easily searchable online. As I have been constantly reminded, the papers are much more accessible now than they were. We have actually done a pretty good job of reconstructing the ways that these papers were grouped considering the circumstances and the unwieldy nature of a 400 linear foot collection.

Dear researchers, soon there will be a finding aid online, I promise!

*The title to this post is a quote from Bob Dylan's epic song "Brownsville Girl," a fitting summary of this processing project if I ever heard one!

For the Foodies

Elizabeth J.J. Brown's cook book (ca. 1860) has come into the lab for repairs. And what a sweet little thing it is, especially the title page:

The Historical Society also owns Martha Washington's Cook Book. Last June we had a Solstice Potluck with staff and interns using the recipes from Mrs. Washington's book. It was quite successful and we've been anticipating the second annual potluck all winter. But perhaps the format will need to change in honor of the Chews the year?

The cookbooks are interesting to compare. Both are written by one writer and were started at both ends. Each has interesting instructions and measurements. For example, Elizabeth has a recipe for Morning Rolls, which calls for "a piece of butter the size of an egg and a 1/2." However, Mrs. Washington's book was clearly written before foods of the new world became part of the diet. There is no mention of tomatoes, potatoes, or squash. Her book is also organized into two sections; one of "cookery" and one of "sweetmeats." Elizabeth's book is full of food from the new world including recipes for catsup of tomatoes and of mushrooms, and references for straining things "as you would for squash." There does not seem to be a logical organization of Elizabeth's book.

Some of the more fun recipes include the "Kisses" above, and the Plumb Gingerbread. Although we have yet to find the plumbs in the gingerbread.

There are interesting recipes for Pickled Walnuts, and sevreal recipes for oysters, (boiled, fried, baked, or as a pie). A few of the eyebrow-raising items include: "Oily Mixture" and one "To Turtle Calves Head."

Along with recipes written down, there are a few dozen given to her by others, hastily written on scraps of paper or cut from the newspaper. She has several for Summer Complaint; this one sounds the yummiest - while others call for Gum Arabic and Laudanum.

And finally, one of the more interesting recipes to compare directly with Mrs. Washington's book is for Tomato Tart.

Without a doubt, the favorite surprise success recipe at last year's potluck was Mrs. Washington's Lettuce Pie. While the recipe sounded easy none of us trusted it to be any good. But Annie put it together it was the hit of the day. I suspect this one could be quite tasty with homegrown tomatoes completely ripened. I also suspect that it could inspire a very nice savory tart as well.

Fashion Tips from the Collection

These photographs from Elizabeth Brown Chew's scrapbook are perfect for a Friday afternoon chuckle. Enjoy!