Scope and Content Note
The papers of Robert Curtis Ogden (1836-1913) span the years 1843-1921, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1890-1913. Included is correspondence, memoranda, notes and drafts of speeches and articles, reports, printed matter, and other material relating to his business career in New York and Philadelphia, interests in philanthropy and the church, and especially to his activities in behalf of education in the South. The collection also contains papers gathered by Ogden's daughter, Helen Ogden Purves, in the decade after her father's death. In many cases the letters in the Ogden papers are copies apparently made by Samuel Chiles Mitchell in the course of research for a biography of Ogden. The collection is organized into six series: Family Papers ; General Correspondence ; Special Correspondence ; Subject File ; Speeches, Writings, and Related Materials ; and Miscellany .
The Family Papers contain genealogical information, diary fragments, death notices and memorials, and correspondence between Ogden and various family members. Although mainly personal, the family correspondence contains information of general interest. Ogden's son-in-law, Alexander Purves, was associated with Hampton Institute, and both his and Helen Ogden Purves's letters contain many references to the institute and other educational matters. The Family Papers also include reminiscences about Ogden that were solicited from acquaintances by Helen Purves for the use of Mitchell.
The General Correspondence indicates the range of Ogden's interests. There is correspondence regarding his business activities, his involvement in the affairs of the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia and in New York, his service on the board of trustees and on the building committee of Union Theological Seminary, and his various philanthropies and disaster relief activities. For the years after 1900, these files are particularly rich on the Southern Improvement Company, an effort to facilitate African-American land ownership in the South, in which Ogden was a principal backer. The letterbook for 1890-1896 contains many letters from Ogden to John Wanamaker.
Ogden achieved his greatest renown late in life as a benefactor and promoter of southern education. The Special Correspondence series, the largest in the collection, is devoted to Ogden's activities in this field. In the series can be traced Ogden's relationship with Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute as well as his involvement in the Conference on Education in the South, the Southern Education Board, the General Education Board, and other activities.
Ogden's interest in education grew out of his longtime acquaintance with S. C. Chapman Armstrong. When Armstrong organized Hampton Institute for the education of southern Negroes, Ogden became a member of the board of trustees. Later, upon Armstrong's death in 1893, he became president of the board of trustees. Approximately 150 letters between Ogden and Armstrong letters, mainly in the Special Correspondence , document the relationship between the two men. An index to the Ogden-Armstrong correspondence is available as a PDF appendix to this finding aid. After 1893, Ogden maintained a steady correspondence with Armstrong's successor, Hollis Burke Frissell, and others associated with Hampton Institute.
Ogden also served as a trustee and for a time as president of the board of Tuskegee Institute. The Special Correspondence file includes about 125 letters, also indexed in the appendix to this finding aid, which were exchanged between Ogden and Tuskegee's president, Booker T. Washington.
Ogden's greatest involvement with southern education, however, was through the Conference on Education in the South. In annual meetings beginning in 1898, the conference brought together leading men of both the North and South to discuss the improvement of southern education. After being chosen president of the conference in 1900, Ogden led in organizing the sessions. Each year he invited a large group of prominent Northerners to attend the conferences as his guests and took them on a rail tour of some portion of the South. Ogden felt that progress was most likely to occur when the “best men” of the North and the South became aware of conditions in the South, discussed the situation with each other, and engaged in cooperative efforts to deal with the problems. Out of the conference were developed the Southern Education Board and the General Education Board, important forces in the effort to improve education in the South in the early twentieth century. The Special Correspondence documents these developments and particularly the tours organized by Ogden.
Among Ogden's correspondents on educational matters are Lyman Abbott, Edwin Anderson Alderman, Charles B. Aycock, Ray Stannard Baker, William Henry Baldwin, Edward William Bok, Nicholas Murray Butler, Wallace Buttrick, Andrew Carnegie, Frank R. Chambers, Philander Priestley Claxton, Schuyler Colfax, J. L. M. Curry, Charles William Dabney, W. E. B. DuBois, Frederick T. Gates, Job E. Hedges, David B. Houston, Seaman A. Knapp, Seth Low, Charles D. McIver, Samuel Chiles Mitchell, Walter Hines Page, George Foster Peabody, John D. Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jay Schlieffelin, Albert Shaw, William H. Taft, Oswald Garrison Villard, and Woodrow Wilson. Ogden's letterbooks provide a partial index to outgoing correspondence between 1903 and 1908.
The Subject File contains minutes, reports, and printed material on Hampton and Tuskegee institutes, year-by-year activities in behalf of southern education after 1898, and other topics. The materials under the heading, “Education in the South,” contain minutes of meetings of the Southern Education Board and the General Board as well as Helen Ogden Purves's notes on the annual Conferences on Education in the South.
The Speeches, Writing, and Related Materials file includes printed transcripts, notes, and drafts of various addresses and articles by Ogden. He was an active churchman, and there are many undated Sunday School or other religious talks in the file. A number of the other speeches and articles are on business topics, including Ogden's lectures on modern retailing given at Harvard University. Still other speeches and writings deal with southern education.
The final series, Miscellany , includes copies of periodicals referring to Ogden, photographs, and scrapbooks covering the periods 1875-1882 and 1901-1910. There is also a clipping file; copies of the Proceedings of the First through Tenth Conferences on Education in the South; Philip W. Wilsonundated's An Unofficial Statesman: Robert C. Ogden (1924); and other books. Of particular value is the unpublished biography of Ogden by Samuel Chiles Mitchell, along with notes and copies of letters collected by Mitchell.