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The bulk of the collection consists of letters to Mrs. Mamie Tibbs and four of her children from family and friends, the majority written from 1939-1945.  Letters from one family member to another are filed in the folder of the recipient; letters in each folder are arranged chronologically.  There are no letters to or from James or Shirley.  There are a number of letters from Albert to various family members filed in the recipients’ folders.  Other papers include a variety of personal and family cards, announcements, invitations, etc.

The papers were left in the family’s house at 712 Elm Street when they moved and were retrieved by Grinnell College students when some letters blew out of the abandoned house into the neighborhood.  This is not a complete family record and does not give a complete accounting of the family history.  The letters do give some insight into the everyday life and concerns of a black family living in a white community during the 1940s and 1950s and of blacks in the armed forces during and after World War II.

Records include minutes of meetings, treasurer’s records (incomplete), programs (incomplete), miscellaneous records, and a recorded interview about the early days of the club by Merta Matlack.

Consists of pamphlets, memos, brochures, correspondence and publications produced by the Trustees, the President's Office, and various administrative units.

The personal correspondence, notes and photographs of former Grinnell professor of physics Grant O. Gale. Gale was educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and got his masters in physics at the University of Michigan in 1933. He taught at Grinnell from 1929 to 1972. The college's observatory is named for Gale, and he was active in several Grinnell community organizations before his passing in 1998.
Gale is remembered for his dedication to his students and to his role as a mentor on the Grinnell campus.

The bulk of the collection consists of Mrs. Orr's recollections about her life and the lives of three of her brothers, and of family photographs.

Dorothy A. Fryer (1923-2019) was born in Norfolk, Nebraska. She was part of Norfolk Junior College's first graduating class. She then attended Grinnell College to major in English and minor in French before graduating in 1946. She had an interest and career in journalism.

Box 1:
Secretary's minutes, 4 books: 1882-1906, 1906-1928, 1928-1944 (includes copy of the club constitution), and 1944-1953

Folder 1: Centennial Sketch, presented April 19, 1982 script, pictures, list of topics, 1882-1928, and napkin from 68th anniversary tea

Folder 2: Study topics and book titles, 1882

Box 2:
Secretary's minutes, 3 books: 1955-1967 (includes copy of club constitution), 1967-1979, 1979-1991 (includes copy of 1988 Proposed revision of Constitution and 1976 Constitution).

Treasurer's books, 2 books: 1926-1956 (savings account) and 1292-1964

Yearbooks, 76 of the possible 100:
1889
1891-1917
1919
1925-1927
1932-1933
1935
1939
1941-1962
1964-1968 (in secretary's book)
1971-1977 (in secretary's book)

Box 3:
Folder 1: Ancient records, 1882-1931 (history of the club, 13 typed leaves)

Folder 2: Constitution and By Laws, 1949 and 1962

Folder 3: 22 papers presented by members from 1925-1954:
Miss French, nee Octave Thanet, 1925
Iowa Legislative Department, 1926
Iowa Board of Control, 1926
The LaTours and Acadia, 1927
The Last of the Titans-Schunabb-Heink, 1932 (used in the Centennial program)
March of Events, 1933
Dickens, David Coperfield, 1934
Guy De Maupassant, 1935
James Hilton, Random Harvest, 1941
Eleanor Dick, the Timeless Land, 1942
Quentin Reynolds, Dress Rehearsal, 1944
Channing Pollock, Harvest of My Years, 1944
Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle, 1946
George F. Willison, Saints and Sinners, 1946
Gilbert Chesterton, Man Who Was Thursday (no date)
South Africa (no date or source)
William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley, Voice of the People, 1951
Lucy Robins Lang, Tomorrow is Beautiful, 1950
Dixon Wector, Sam Clemons of Hannibal, 1954
Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightengale, 1952
Emily Kimbrough, Forty Plus and Fancy Free, 1954

Folder 4: loose papers form 1931 scrapbook (includes newspaper clippings 1931-1938)

Scrapbook. 1931. Project for Iowa Federation of Women's Clubs. [Clippings and other papers removed from the scrapbook are filed in Box 3, folder 4]

Information concerning brothers John and William Windsor, who together were the first graduates of Iowa College [Grinnell College] in 1854. There is also a small amount of information about their family history.

Two folders of correspondence written by Murray McMurray (class of 1910). The bulk of the correspondence is addressed to Jessie.

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.

Contains notes and observations, minutes, correspondence, library records, and two publications - Grinnell Cabinet and Agassiz Notes - from the Grinnell Chapter.