Finding Aids

Alpheus Hollister (1793-1870) was the proprietor of a sawmill and grist mill and a merchant at Hollisterville, Salem Township, Wayne County, Pennsylvania. The collection consists of two account books for a general store at Hollisterville. The first volume (1848-1849) has been used as a scrapbook by a descendant and is filled with newspaper clippings, mostly sentimental or sensational stories from the 1880s, many from central New York State. The second volume (1860-1867) records typical general store transactions.

Brown & Hewett were merchants of Oneida County, New York. The journal contains the accounts of individuals doing business with the firm, which was a typical backcountry mercantile enterprise trading imported goods such as brandy, rum, tobacco, paper, textiles, and merchandise for local staples like wheat and lumber.

George Bowen (1799-1879) founded a ship chandler's business in Newport, Rhode Island, around 1829, as the George Bowen & Company. The fragmentary records consist of sixteen volumes of account books, which describe the mechanics of the business and the retail trade in coal and wood, giving names of customers, quantities of goods bought and sold, and operating expenses.

Lynch and Stoughton was a New York mercantile firm that traded extensively with Spain, Portugal, Holland, the West Indies, Florida, Ireland, and China, in the coasting trade between Pennsylvania and New England, and with the interior of New York State. The ledger documents the firm's mercantile business between 1783 and 1788. The ledger appears to have later been passed down through several generations of the Stow family of New York and Michigan, who used it as a scrapbook for scrap paper and practicing penmanship.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pennsylvania was already a leader in the coal, iron, steel, railroad, and petroleum industries. As the manufacturing industries grew in the cities, so did the small businesses of craftsman and artisans that populated the surrounding areas selling their goods. These merchants played an important role in trade, community relationships, and the economy.  This is an artificial collection of account books, cash ledgers, and receipt books of nineteenth-century merchants of various industries in Pennsylvania. Minimal correspondence is included as well as a poem.  Mineral, iron and leather industries are represented as well as organ building which includes two treatises written in German.  

The Phillips family were prominent Philadelphia merchants and manufacturers over four generations. The records consist of four volumes of merchant and importer William Phillips (1771-1845), a daybook from the textile firm of Lewis, Phillips & Co., and an unrelated receipt book of Philadelphia wine merchant Francis Coppinger, dating from 1794 to 1795.