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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.

Consists of treasurer's reports, minutes, clippings, and correspondence of the Elizabeth Earle Magoun Club.

Consists of three boxes of negatives, several candid pictures of college, and an aerial shot of North Campus.

Mr. Bowers was a Grinnell Football and Golf coach for over 25 years, starting in the early 60's.  This colletion is primarily photos, clippings, and letters from those years.

The collection consists of typewritten notes Mr. Beatty made for his “History of Grinnell College and its Curriculum to 1931” (August 1955), the original typescript of which is in the Archives 06.1/B38h. The notes are on 5 1⁄2 by 8 1⁄2 sheets filed in four archives boxes (20 linear inches); bibliography cards are filed in Box 2. The information on the notes would be most valuable for a person interested in pre-1931 curricular and academic aspects and in a brief general history of the college. References from which the notes were derived could direct a researcher to more detailed sources. In a 1980 letter Mr. Beatty indicated part of his research was “based on the trunk full of presidential and departmental reports tied each separately in ribbon by Mrs. Minora Rusk, former secretary to several of the earliest presidents (the trunk having been “lost: and covered over under the floor of the treasurer’s office in Magoun or Chicago Hall).”

Consists of holograph, typescript, and proofs of Joseph Wall's biography, Andrew Carnegie (1970), holograph and typescript of Henry Watterson: Reconstructed Rebel (1956), and of the page proof of Interpreting Twentieth-Century America (1973).  A small part of the collection includes some correspondence connected with Andrew Carnegie. Also included is a typescript of the Grinnell College Faculty Handbook (1969) and talks and memos concerning the Abler-Woodworth controversy of 1974.

The collection consists of genealogical charts 1480 0 1919.  Correspondence ca. 1898-1908, 32 portraits, some unidentified, copies of cemetery inscriptions, Family Association publications for the Chapin (4 books, 1862, 1908, 1908, 1927) and Alden (1 book, 1916) families, sixty Chapin family deeds and documents from Massachusetts 1674-1851, and a 114-page handwritten notebook by E. F. G. of Stockbridge, 1848, family history of Chapin ancestors Dudley, Woodbridge, Jones, and Eliot.

The papers have detailed information about a few branches of the family, little or no information on other branches.  The researcher might consult U.S. Library of Congress, Genealogies in the Library of Congress to identify more complete sources.

Genealogical charts in this collection trace part of the Grinnell family from Pierre Grenelle, born about 1480 in France. A descendant, Matthew, born 1602, became a Protestant and moved to Newport, R.I., in 1630, beginning the American line of the family. Matthew’s son married a granddaughter of John and Priscilla Alden. Other charts trace various branches of the Chapin family from about 1576 to Mary Grinnell’s birth about 1857.

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.

Materials from 1952-1956 and subsequent class reunions.

Materials collected by the class agents relating to the Grinnell College Class of 1957.

The collection contains a scrapbook, thee editions of "The Malteaser" (March, April, May of 1926), Smith Hall materials, reunion materials, and photographs.

Wendell Oliver Metcalf attended Grinnell College from 1923-1926. He died in 1993.

Commencement programs, Grinnell College Directory, Grinnell College Bulletin, photograph.

Consists of minutes of the Executive Committee of the Trustees, the Board of Trustees, the Finance Committee, and materials on the Fund for Excellence.

The cyclone of June 1882 destroyed the minutes of meetings of the Trustees of Iowa College. S. L. Herrick, Secretary of the Board, copied his records of meetings prior to that date.

Items in the Treasurer's Office record group span the years 1847-1980.  Records from the 19th Century (Series 1 and 4) consist chiefly of ledgers, journals, and donor lists.

Prior to 1887 the college had no office force, and a Trustee served as Treasurer (without salary). Several local bankers serves as treasurers and auditors during the Gates' administration, The first salaried Treasurer was H. H. Robbins.

H. H. Robbins, 1869, was Secretary and Treasurer of Iowa College 1887-1906, and was a Trustee 1890-1906. Prior to 1887 he was a Congregational minister and a railroad engineer. He was the son of Iowa Band Member A. B. Robbins, who was the first president of the Board.

H. W. Somers, 1882, became Business Manager and Secretary in 1907. His duties were to direct the financial and accounting system of the college and to direct fund raising. In 1916 his title changed to Secretary and Treasurer, and Louis Pyelps became Business Manager. Somers served until 1919.
Louis Phelps came as Business Manager in 1916, was college Treasurer 1919-1949. He was Secretary of the Grinnell College Foundation 1917-ca. 1954. Prior to coming to Grinnell he was a construction engineer, and was involved in construction of the women’s quadrangle 1914-1916.

Rupert Hawk, Treasurer, 1949-1956
Charles Kaufman served as Accountant 1942-1956 and as Treasurer 1956-1966
Donald Lambie, Treasurer, 1966-1972
Robert Anderson, Treasurer, 1972-1988
Waldo Walker, Treasurer, 1988-1990
David Clay, Treasurer, 1990-

From about 1913 to 1940 the college expanded its facilities dramatically.  Louis Phelps, College Treasurer 1919-1949, and Grinnell College Foundation Secretary 1917-ca.1954, preserved most of the papers which expedited the financing and construction of the dormitories and a few other buildings during this period.  Series 3-5 are from his files.

Providing on-campus dormitores for students was a new phenomenon in the early part of the twentieth century, and financing their construction called for considerable ingenuity.  Grinnell was a pioneer in this, and other colleges and universities studied the example.  One officer of the General Education Board, a Rockefeller philanthropy which contributed significantly to the College, praised President Main for pioneering in the social and educational experiment; another officer feared that war or pestilence might create serious problems in dormitories (RG-T, Ser. 3.4, folder 2, Phelps to Arnett, 6/22/30),.  The College Trustees created Grinnell College Foundation to raise the funds.  Details of their activities are in Series 6 and Series 3.4 of this record group.  Dormitory construction records are in Series 4.

Part of the financing involved owning, managing, and selling farms and other real estate.  Correspondence between Mr. Phelps and the farmers and farm managers (in series 5) records on a day-to-day basis the myriad problems farmers faced during the 1920s and 30s in the midwest.  Text books describe the agricultural situation, but this correspondence brings home what it was like to live and cope with falling market prices, crop diseases, pernicious weather patterns, and personal tragedies.  The correspondence includes such details as building and equipment repairs; livestock sales; plant and animal diseases; when to castrate the pigs; planting windbreaks; inability to get crops to market because of muddy roads; government farm assistance programs; trial planiting of the new hybrid corn seed.  Phelps was involved in all of these details.