May 07, 2020 - Sale 2534

Sale 2534 - Lot 259

Price Realized: $ 2,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(FAMILY PAPERS.) The family Bible and related family papers of the Rev. Nelson Carter of western Pennsylvania. 48 items (0.3 linear feet) in one box, various sizes and conditions. Vp, 1847-1950
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Additional Details

The Rev. Nelson Carter (1808-1856) was an itinerant African Methodist Episcopal minister in western Pennsylvania. His family Bible is an 1847 printing by the American Bible Society, with 5 pages of manuscript family records bound between the Old and New Testaments, starting with Rev. Carter's birth in 1808, through the deaths of his grandson and wife in 1948 and 1950. Places are not generally given, but his son John N. Carter's 1885 marriage in San Angelo, TX is an exception. The Bible is 868, 303, [1] pages, large 8vo format, in its original worn full calf binding.
Accompanying the Bible is a small collection of 47 related items from the family of Rev. Carter's daughter Harriet Carter Butler (1848-1923) dated 1890 to 1932, including a memorandum book kept by her daughter Marcella Peters Butler (1873-1959) in 1922 with a 10-page family history. It includes two pages of narrative of her grandmother Jane Carter (1808-1900) under slavery: "She lived to be 92 years old and told of many events in her life." During the War of 1812, her owner fled Baltimore "but locked her in the feed house when the Brittish tried to burn the city. She was left there all night alone, a little 4 year old negro girl, but God saved her." She was sent to West Virginia with her owner's son: "She remembered her mother standing by the wagon crying. She never heard or saw her again." She was later manumitted: "He gave her her freedom and promised her $50 and a feather bed which she never received."
Also included are: Locket of hair Two typed letters from son William N. Butler dated 1901 as a lawyer in Washington, PA, one of them graphically describing the execution by hanging of two convicted African-American murderers An unsigned partial essay titled "Our Race" on the history of slavery and progress since A unsigned letter to the editor of the Gazette Times, 12 September 1907, insisting that "I have lived in Beaver County now for 18 years and not once during this time have I or any member of my family been insulted because of color, but on the contrary have always been treated with courtesy." 7 family photographs circa 1900 and a letter from Jabez Pitt Campbell, bishop of the A.ME. Church, 1885.