(NEW YORK CITY) Archive of Strong family papers

Sale 2207 - Lot 184

Price Realized: $ 4,080

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

Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500

INCLUDING THE DIARY OF GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG'S ELDEST SON (NEW YORK CITY.) Archive of Strong family papers. Approximately 30 items, 0.7 linear feet; various sizes and conditions but generally somewhat worn. New York and elsewhere, circa 1850-1940

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Additional Details

At the heart of this lot are detailed diaries by John Ruggles Strong (1851-1941). Strong was a lawyer, poet, and musician from an old New York family. He was the son of George Templeton Strong, whose own observant and eloquent New York diary later caused a great stir when it was discovered and published in 1952. The John Ruggles Strong diary is also written largely in Manhattan, other than a few travel interludes. He was a retired widower by the time of his first diary, from 1909 to 1929, and the central figure throughout is his adult son George Templeton Strong III (born 1888). The two had a contentious relationship. From 1923 to 1937, John began keeping a separate diary on loose sheets, with each page headed "George." It begins as a list of everything his son did which annoyed him. A typical entry reads "George left the church when the communicants walked to the altar, walking against their current" (17 February 1929). George's drinking and spending were also concerns. On 14 March 1929, John expelled his 40-year-old son from his home, telling him "You can stay here until tomorrow morning after breakfast, but after that you must not come here again till you come to pack and take away your things." Their uptown neighborhood, Hamilton Heights in West Harlem, was then in transition from a distinguished white neighborhood to an elite black neighborhood, touched upon here: "George says the owner or manager of the tennis court in front of his house, a Jew named Ullman, has rented the court to Negroes, refusing to rent it any longer to the present white tenants" (1 December 1934).
Also included in this lot are approximately 100 family photographs, most of them mounted in two albums. Two of the photographs are cabinet portraits of George Templeton Strong I, another shows family patriarch George Washington Strong (1783-1855), and one album is from an 1895 family vacation in the Catskill Mountains.