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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.

Edith Renfrow Smith (1914- ), class of 1937, is the first Black female graduate of Grinnell College.

Materials include articles about Mrs. Smith and her connection to the college and town of Grinnell, a photo book from the dedication of the Smith Gallery, The Grinnell Magazine Summer 2007 with Mrs. Renfrow Smith on the cover, and the Congressional Record Tribute from 2002 (oversized).

The collection includes nine photographic prints used at the exhibit "The True Grinnellian: An exhibition to honor Edith Renfrow Smith '37" that accompanied the re-dedication of the Edith Renfrow Smith '37 Student Art Gallery on October 28, 2021. Filed in Oversize #1

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is manuscripts of his writings, including his autobiography, novels, short stories, essays, and poems, published and unpublished.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.

The collection is divided into three series: Correspondence & drafts of history; Research materials, notes, etc.; Alumni files arranged chronologically by graduation year.

The collection consists of invitations, announcements, notes, programs, college publications, notebooks, an issue of a newspaper, certificates and teaching recommendations.

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.

Materials from 1952-1956 and subsequent class reunions.

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.

This oral history collection is a celebration of nearly 70 years of Grinnell College history as told through the words of people who have studied, worked, and played at this institution.

Drawn from interviews with more than 50 alumni, these remembrances tell not only about the specifics of college life, but also about the collective identity of the Grinnell community.  These interviews offer insight into the successes and struggles of individuals and into the traditions and values that define Grinnell, whether they occurred in 1925, 1945, 1972, or 1992.

[This note is quoted from the brochure created for the exhibition (photographs and excerpts of the interviews) that was displayed in the Burling Gallery, June 1-September 23, 1995.]

Books of the Middle Ages is a 20-leaf, typewritten manuscript.  The leaves have simple borders, one set inside the other by one inch.  Between the two borders are hand-drawn decorations of plant and animal life that are subtly water colored.  The manuscript is bound in a heavy-weight paper and is tied along the spine with a ribbon.

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.

Consists of Mertaugh’s research notes for her pamphlet, Beginner's Field Guide to Grinnell and Its Environs.

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.