Scope and arrangement
The Hudson Collection consists of mid-seventeenth through early nineteenth century correspondence, accounts, legal documents, land papers, business papers, and shipping papers of families living in the Essex County, Massachusetts towns of Newburyport, Salisbury, and Amesbury; also in Boston, New York City, and Rumford (now Concord), New Hampshire. The papers document family matters; sea-faring; trade between New England and New York, and the West Indies, Great Britain, Russia (Archangel), and other New World and European ports; land transactions; and contain references to political and other events of the day. The bulk of the papers document the intermarried Hudson and Rogers families who lived in Newburyport, with branches in New York and Boston, mid-eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries.
Included are the papers of Captain James Hudson (circa 1718-1792), Newburyport sea captain and owner of a salt-works at Salisbury; his son Henry Hudson (1747-1823), a Newburyport merchant; Henry Hudson's wife, Anna Rogers Hudson, and their son John Rogers Hudson (b. 1784), also a merchant in Newburyport; Anna Rogers Hudson's father John Rogers, a Boston merchant, her mother, Mary Davenport Rogers, and other family members. Mary Davenport Rogers was a niece of Benjamin Franklin (her mother was Sarah Franklin Davenport, Benjamin Franklin's sister), and sane papers, 1770-1793, concerning Franklin's estate are included.
Also included are papers of members of the related Balch family of Newburyport, 1766-1837; and of the Hodge family of Newburyport, 1778-1816; the Morse family of Amesbury, 1737-1828, particularly Benjamin Morse, an Amesbury constable and highway surveyor; the True family of Salisbury,1659-1835, particularly Jabez True, (b. 1764), Captain Henry True (1644-1735, militia officer and town clerk), and Deacon Samuel True; and the Rolfe family of Rumford (Concord), New Hampshire.
Some additional personal, town, church, school, business, and ship papers are in the collection. Included among these are: an undated Essex County, Massachusetts tax list (circa 1750); records, 1826-1836, of the Newburyport Lancastrian school; papers, 1773-1797, of Ezra Morrill, a ship's ironworker who lived in Salisbury; recipes for medical remedies; two account books, 1778-1781, of the Newburyport firm Ingersoll and Co. concerning the ships America and Delight; records, 1780-1784, of the schooner Success; papers of ship-builder William Hackett of Salisbury concerning the building of the ship Massachusetts at Braintree, 1787-1791; and notes of protest for storm damages made by Captain Christopher H. Cooksey at Rio de Janeiro before the United States Consul, for his ship Eunomous.
Included among a small group of miscellaneous letters and documents, circa 1647-1853, is an undated (pre-Revolutionary) fragment of a military commission belonging to Richard Saltonstall, possibly the prominent Massachusetts colonist of that name, circa 1610-1694.