(MASSACHUSETTS) Archive of Washburn family papers

Sale 2174 - Lot 163

Price Realized: $ 14,400

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000

(MASSACHUSETTS.) Archive of Washburn family papers. 16 volumes and thousands of loose sheets, 8 linear feet; various sizes and conditions. Vp, mostly 1822-95

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Emory Washburn (1800-1877) of Worcester and Cambridge, MA served as governor of Massachusetts from 1854 to 1855, followed by twenty years as a professor at Harvard Law School. He was the author of numerous law and history books, and a founder of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This collection includes family papers from three generations, most notably Gov. Emory Washburn, his wife Marianne Giles Washburn (1810-1898), their daughter Marianne B. "Minnie" Batchelder (1831-1922), and her son Samuel F. "Frank" Batchelder (1870-1927). Many of these papers are intermixed in no particular order, still folded and generally in excellent condition. The largest share are Emory Washburn''s, including a box containing several hundred letters from Louis Agassiz, Nathaniel Banks, Salmon Chase, William H. Seward, most of the other Massachusetts politicians of his day, and many more. Also among his papers are paid bills, 8 Independence Day orations given by Washburn, 1822-44, his lengthy European travel journal from 1852, an 1861 diary, and a long "Memoranda of Some Incidents Connected with My Service as Gov." Daughter Marianne received letters from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Eliot Norton. All told, this is an important archive of Massachusetts political and social life from before, during, and after the Civil War.