County of Onondaga

Syracuse, New York’s Onondaga County Public Library will provide conservation treatment to its “Autograph Manuscript Collection.” This collection consists of 218 letters written in the 18th and 19th centuries by a wide range of United States historical figures, among them Louisa May Alcott, John Quincy Adams, Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Andrew Jackson, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. A number of the letters contain significant historical content such as Frederick Douglass’s note where he defends his marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman, or Syracuse pioneer Comfort Tyler’s written description of his plan to set up a colony on the lower Mississippi and to rule it, without ties to the United States, with friend Aaron Burr. Each of these detailed, first-person accounts give their readers a compelling window into the past.