Found 3 collections related to Real property -- United States

The Mercantile Collection, 1726-1950, is a synthetic collection documenting mercantile and other business activities from the early-17th to the mid-20th centuries, especially in the northeastern United States. It consists of papers and records created by persons, firms, and companies engaged chiefly in trade, finance, insurance, mining, railroad management, shipping, and whaling. A few items pertain to manufacturing and real estate. Transatlantic commerce in the colonial and early-national period, and the early railroad industry in America, are strongly represented. Notable material includes the assorted papers of New York City and Philadelphia merchants, among them members of the Pemberton family of Philadelphia; Vice-Admiralty court proceedings; and the incomplete ledger of an 18th-century New York City druggist. less

Adam W. Spies (1800-1891), the son of Mary Bergh and John Spies, was a hardware and military goods merchant in New York City. He was employed by the firm of C. & J. D. Wolfe, and was their agent in England in the 1820s. In 1834 he established A. W. Spies & Company, later Spies, Kissam & Company, retiring in 1866. He acquired extensive landholdings in New York City, upstate New York, and numerous other states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, among others. In 1832 he married Sarah Ann Morrison (d. 1883), daughter of John C. Morrison of Monmouth County, New Jersey. Spies was a founding member of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor.The Adam W. Spies real estate and genealogy scrapbook is primarily a record of his real estate transactions, containing numerous manuscript plat maps, many in watercolor with extensive annotations; a few printed maps; listings of properties, taxes and assessments; and legal notes. Holdings in Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn are especially well documented. Genealogical materials include charts and notes concerning the Spies, Morrison, and Bergh families, and autobiographical accounts, with advice to grandchildren, recalling his career, his service as a volunteer fireman, and life in Manhattan prior to the building of the Erie Canal and Croton Aqueduct. The volume also contains pasted clippings, certificates and receipts, cut silhouettes of Spies, and a few sketches, notably a watercolor street view by Spies of his father’s place of business in Manhattan as depicted in 1808. There are some miscellaneous letters and notes relating to family and real estate matters, some loose, including a genealogical inquiry to his son-in-law John W. Cochrane dated 1907. A few of Spies’s genealogical entries are updated to 1930. The scrapbook has multiple and duplicate paginations, with gaps: Index, p. 1-48, 50-58, [3 p.]; property maps with index, p. 0-100; and additional genealogical and autobiographical material, p. 133-143; 137-138, 139 (2 leaves), 142-155. Text and maps are separately indexed. less

John Alcott Carpenter (1921–1978) was a historian, history professor, and public speaker. He published biographies of Oliver Otis Howard and Ulysses S. Grant. This collection includes manuscripts, typescripts, research notes, and printed matter used by Carpenter for various writing. less