Scope and Content Note
The autograph collection of Sarah Stone (fl. 1840) spans the years 1720-1962, with the latest autographed item dating from 1947. The collection contains letters, clipped signatures, and other signed items of prominent American and a few British figures, chiefly of the nineteenth century.
The collection originated with Henry Colman (1785-1849), a Unitarian clergyman and friend of the Stone family, who initiated it with the gift of nineteen items to Sarah Stone in the early 1840s. Colman had received the items mainly in the course of studying agricultural methods in this country and in Europe, including signed letters by George Washington and British General Augustine Prevost during the Revolutionary War. Colman’s correspondents include John Adams, Henry Clay, Edward Everett ( who in 1837 appointed him commissioner to make an agricultural survey of Massachusetts) Angelina Emily Grimké, Benjamin Silliman, James Madison, Daniel Webster, and Martin Van Buren.
Other persons represented include John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Benjamin F. Butler, John C. Calhoun, Albert Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander Hamilton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Jefferson, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and Booker T. Washington. Some letters were received by Sarah Stone herself or by members of her family, who were sailors and ship owners of Salem, Massachusetts, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, active in trade with China, Sumatra, and the West Indies. Some were friends of the family of Washington Irving. There are references to Irving in their correspondence as well as one of the author’s letters and a page of a manuscript in his hand.