Finding Aids

Anthony Morris (1766-1860) was a lawyer and merchant of Philadelphia. Morris was active in the East India trade. This collection includes two letterbooks and one ledger. The letterbooks are mostly concerned with his business affairs. The letters date from 1787 to 1800. His ledger includes household accounts and records of expenses on voyages to China, India and England. The ledger dates from 1800 to 1806.

The Collection of Philadelphia merchants records comprises the papers of major and minor merchant houses in Philadelphia throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and primarily documents trade with major port cities in Western Europe and the West Indies. Included are the papers of merchants Andrew Clow & Co., Dutilh & Wachsmuth, Manuel Eyre, and George Louis de Stockar, along with records of other miscellaneous merchants from the Philadelphia area. The records include correspondence, accounts, bills, orders, invoices and other material that give insight into the rise of capitalism in the Early Republic.

Joseph P. Hornor (1785-1845) was a merchant in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century. The collection is comprised of a letter book of Hornor's outbound letters, describing mercantile business spreading throughout the Philadelphia hinterlands.

Peter Arnold Karthaus (1765-1840) immigrated to the United States from Hamburg, Germany in 1796 and established a mercantile business in the West Branch of the Susquehanna River Valley. The collection documents Karthaus' mercantile business, land development in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, and his partnership with fellow German immigrant, Frederick W. Geissenhainer, a pioneer in using coal to smelt iron.

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.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817), known as Madame de Staël, was a writer, philosopher, and politically engaged woman who survived the French Revolution and was exiled multiple times by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). The letter from "Necker de Stael Holstein" to Le Roy, Bayard & Co., New York, concerning accounts with the firm and with W. Saladin.

Masters & Markoe was a mercantile house which operated throughout the early nineteenth century. Most of the records date from the period 1810 to 1814 and document the West Indian trade of Markoe & Masters. The collection consists of the business correspondence and accounts records which shows that the firm was primarily involved with the importation of sugar from Santa Cruz (St. Croix). The company also imported molasses, rum, coffee, mahogany, and logwood. There are also personal papers of the firms co-founder, Thomas Masters (1781-1844) and members of his family.

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.