Samuel Gardiner Wright (1781-1845) was a West Jersey Quaker merchant and ironmaster who conducted a wide-ranging mercantile business based in Philadelphia, iron furnaces in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and in southern Delaware and maintained a country house and farm in Monmouth County, N.J. The papers document his varied business interests, especially iron manufacture and sales. There are smaller quantities of papers from his wife, sons and grandson.

Papers of four generations of the Wright family of Monmouth County, New Jersey, and Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, particularly of Samuel G. Wright (1781-1845), Philadelphia merchant and general entrepreneur, and his son, Harrison Gardiner Wright (1810-1885), a gentleman farmer.