Captain C.E. (Clarence Edward) "Bim" Argyle (1927-2006) was a riverboat captain for Consolidation Coal and a World War II Navy veteran. He worked primarily on steamers and coal barges along the Monongahela River in Western Pennsylvania. These two albums record Argyle's river experience between 1943 and 1950. There are portraits of his co-workers as well as many photographs of numerous commercial boats.

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.  

Samuel Francis du Pont (1803-1865) was a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy and fought in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. The letter from du Pont to John E. Hoey (1837-1896) concerns the transport of invalid seamen northfrom from the South Atlantic Bloackade Squadron.