Scope and Content Note
The records of Stephen Collins and Son (Philadelphia, Pa.) span the years 1749-1857. The collection consists of account books, business correspondence, ledgers, journals, daybooks, waste books, and other records of the Pennsylvania mercantile firm headed by Stephen Collins (1733-1794) and his son and partner, Zaccheus Collins (1764-1831). Included are business records of William Barrell, merchant of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Philadelphia, and of Solomon Fussell, also of Philadelphia, received by Collins as executor of their estates. Collins was born in a Quaker family of Lynn, Massachusetts, and engaged in business in Marblehead before coming to Philadelphia. The collection is organized into two series: Correspondence and Financial Files .
Chief British correspondents in the collection are the Quaker merchants of William Neate and Daniel Mildred of London and the merchant firm Elam and Glover of Leeds. Other clients and correspondents include ironmongers Jukes, Coulson & Company; the textile firms Smithson & Greaves of Leeds and Harrison, Ansley & Company of London; and the hardware firm Hyde & Hamilton of Manchester. Henry Chapman, a son-in-law of Willliam Neate, provides numerous accounts of New York economic conditions and troubles with debtors.
Throughout the collection are letters from Collins family members from Lynn, notably a brother who was a master shoemaker buying supplies from Philadelphia and returning barrels of the finished product for sale. Many letters are from the small storekeepers to whom Collins sold British goods. Others are from the English merchants who provided them.
In 1794, Stephen Collins’s daughter Elizabeth married Richard Bland Lee of Virginia, who had been a member of Congress. Thereafter, Zaccheus Collins collected bank dividends for Richard Bland Lee’s brother, Charles Lee, and became involved with the debts of another brother, Light Horse Harry Lee, as well as with management of land holdings in Pennsylvania inherited by Richard’s wife from her father.