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Archival description
Grinnell (Iowa)
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Irving Hart Collection

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.58
  • Collection

There are two pieces to the Irving Hart collection in the Grinnell College Archives.  One is a letter that Elizabeth Kelsey (Class of 1898) wrote to Hart in April 1898 as he was leaving Grinnell to serve in the Spanish–American War, and the other is an autograph album with signatures of students and faculty from the 1870s when Irving’s mother, Elizabeth Biggar Hart, was a student.

Ivan Sheets Postcard Collection 1900-2000 early 20th century

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.107
  • Collection

The Ivan Sheets collection contains approximately 400 post cards of towns primarily in Poweshiek County, Iowa.  The are 334 post cards of Grinnell and 74 post cards of surrounding towns including Brooklyn, Malcom, Montezuma, Newton, and Oskaloosa.

Sheets, Ivan W.

Jack Robertson Photograph Collection 1986

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.173
  • Collection

Photographs taken by Grinnell College employee Jack Robertson during the 1986 school year. The majority of the photographs are of teaching faculty members, but many photos are also of students.

Robertson, Jack

James Cunningham Town History Files

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.169
  • Collection

Jim Cunningham donated a series of postcards with images of the Grinnell College campus that were for sale in Cunningham's Drug Store. Also included are two newspaper clippings regarding local Grinnell events.

Cunningham, James

James Langdon Hill Papers 1715-1928

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.43
  • Collection

This may be an autograph collection of Hill’s; or it may be a collection of historical items collected by various persons. In the collection is a notebook that has one poem written in it; letters and correspondence of Hill’s were found in the notebook.

Items in the large scrapbook may be part of his collection because one of the autographs mentioned in Hill’s letter in the Correspondence file was in the scrapbook. There were other letters in the scrapbook that indicate that some of the items were from different sources and were collected for a type of historical collection. There is a note attached to two, 1840 receipts: “Professor Spencer: Do you have charge of a collection such as these? / E. L. Long” and a letter to Rev. Parker from Lyman Whiting that was enclosed with some historical items: “...[they] have a bit of history in them which leads me to send them to you to dispose of as you think best. If worth keeping in the museum, please put them there; if fit only to be burned, let that be their fate.” Items from the scrapbook that seemed to have a different provenance were put into file folders.

Hill, James Langdon (Class of 1871)

James McNally photograph collection 1857-1961

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.23
  • Collection

James McNally collected photographs, both black-and-white and color, that depict buildings and Grinnell scenes from about 1857-1961.  The collection of photographs has been donated to Stewart Library.

Copies of outstanding and representative pictures in the collection were made into slides and the slides donated to the archives.  Vera provided the descriptions of the photographs in 1983.  There are two sets of slides: the original slides and another set that are loaded into a carousel.  The latter set may be borrowed with approval of the College Archivist.

McNally, James

James Norman Hall Papers 1906-1954

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.01
  • Collection

The James Norman Hall papers at Grinnell College span the years 1906-54.  About half the collection is correspondence, clippings, photographs, and notebooks, the other half is manuscripts of his writings, including his autobiography, novels, short stories, essays, and poems, published and unpublished.  The 665 letters and post cards are arranged chronologically.  A small portion are from Hall's four years in Boston before World War I, nearly half are from World War I and post war years, and the rest from the last 25 years of his life.  Much of the correspondence is with his family and two Boston friends, George Courtright Greener (1911-53), Director of the North Bennet Street Industrial School, and Roy Cushman (1914-50), Probation Officer in Juvenile Court.  Other correspondence includes letters and cards from Hall to his former Grinnell professors, Charles Payne (1916-44) and George L. Pierce (1911-50), from his college roommate, Chester C. Davis (1910-19), newspaperman, head of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in the 1930's and president of the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, and a few letters from Ellery Sedgwick, editor of Atlantic Monthly.  The Atlantic Monthly-Hall-Nordhoff correspondence is on 14 rolls of microfilm, and the Sedgwick-Hall correspondence is on one roll in the Archives.  A few letters are exchanges between friends with comments about Hall.  Some letters are typed, some are carbons, most are handwritten.  A typed version of selected war letters is included.  The Archives does not have Robert Dean Frisbie's letters on which Hall's story "Frisbie of Danger Island" is based, nor correspondence with Nordhoff.

Most of the newspaper clippings are reports of Hall's war experiences and reviews of his books, a few are about Hall, Tahiti, and the South Seas.  Most photographs are from World War I and his Iceland trip, a few are of his family in Tahiti.

Twenty-eight small handwritten notebooks, some of which record Hall's travels and outlines of stories and poems, a diary of the 1909 Grinnell College Glee Club tour to the west coast, and Hall's Grandfather Young's small Civil War diary (1864) are also in the collection.  Two rolls of microfilm in the Archives contain war letters, pages of notebooks and other items selected from the Grinnell collection by Paul Briand Jr., who wrote a biography of Hall.

Over half of the collection consists of typescripts, some with revisions or several versions of sections, of nine of the twelve books Nordhoff and Hall co-authored (manuscripts of the first three, published before 1930, are not in the collection), of parts or all of seven of the seventeen books Hall published alone, of scripts of two of Hall's plays, of typescripts or holograph versions of 19 of the more than 80 published magazine pieces, and of about sixty unpublished poems, stories, and essays, most undated.  The Archives owns 28 books Hall wrote by himself or coauthored with Nordhoff, including foreign language editions of some titles.

The Hall papers at Grinnell College are a valuable resource for anyone studying his career as a writer, his travels, experiences, ideas, and the sources of some of his stories.  Hall's war correspondence is particularly enlightening for the World War I scholar interested in the human aspect of the war.

Hall, James Norman (Class of 1910)

Jesse Macy Papers 1876-1919

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.70
  • Collection

The collection contains correspondence between Macy and several people from the 1870s to 1919, including a letter from Woodrow Wilson thanking Macy for a gift and for his congratulations on the 1910 New Jersey gubernatorial election. There are a number of miscellaneous family documents, Macy’s diary from 1864-65 in Savannah, Georgia, and sixty letters of tribute at the time of Macy’s death.

Macy, Jesse

Jimmy Ley Papers 1922-1981 1940-1945

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.162
  • Collection

This collection is organized into four series: Biographical, Correspondence, Military, and Photographs.

Series 1: Biographical (1924-1981)

The Biographical series includes personal items including Ley’s birth certificate, framed high school basketball letter, and Catechism bible, as well as a handwritten copy of a poem composed by his mother for his funeral service. The series also includes an extensive scrapbook including photos, personal and educational documents, and newspaper clippings from early childhood until after his death.

Series 2: Correspondence (1939-1946)

The Correspondence series consists of three sub-series: letters written by Jimmy Ley, letters written to Ley and returned to his parents, and letters written to his parents after his disappearance. Ley’s letters are almost exclusively addressed to his parents and date from between just before he first attended Grinnell College in the fall of 1939 until his disappearance in February 1944. Ley’s letters are organized chronologically and divided into folders by location, mostly military camps where Ley was stationed. Mostly written by the families of other missing men in Ley’s flight crew, the letters to Jimmy’s parents after his death date from between November 1944 and August 1945 and are arranged alphabetically by sender’s last name.

Series 3: Military (unkown-1948)

The Military series consists of Ley’s official certificates and awards, bomb squadron yearbook, air force patch, and framed medals (Distinguished Flying Cross, 3 Oak Leaf Clusters, and Purple Heart).

Series 4: Photographs (unknown-1945)

The Photographs series includes fifteen unframed photographs, a portrait in a display folder, a framed photo collage documenting the medals Ley earned, a large framed portrait displayed at Ley’s funeral, and a large framed artistic collage of Ley’s plane and flight crew.

Ley, James

Joanne Bunge Papers

  • US US-IaGG MS/01.170
  • Collection

Materials from 1952-1956 and subsequent class reunions.

John and Louise Nollen Correspondence 1906-1932

  • US US-IaGG MS/MS 01.32
  • Collection

The collection consists primarily of letters written to John Nollen from members of his family 1906-32.  Correspondents include his parents, his wife, Louise, brother Henry, and his sisters Hanna and Sara.  The two sisters taught 1929-33 at Anatolia College, Salonika, Greece.  The collection includes their letters to John as well as typed copies of their letters to other members of the family and contain descriptions of their travels during those years.

Nollen, John S.

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