Just wondering.

[onejayhawk]

This is a line from a story, "Who knew a Continental Army Colonel in the family tree could be such fun?

Background. This is a fictional family, from a fictional small New Jersey city. They have a house in the country, by a lake, in prime farm and orchard land. The first house was constructed when "Benjamin Franklin was a boy." You get an old, established family, and a place to accumulate papers and artifacts.

Enter grad students. They spend a week gathering a bushel basket (literally) full of notes, receipts, diaries, letters and other papers. The owner of the home agrees to allow the University to scan everything and to keep one pound of physical paper for a display.

Two questions:

1) How plausible is the scenario? By that I mean discovering a large amount of well preserved papers of an officer from the Revolutionary War.

2) What would it be worth in historical and literal terms?

J

 

[sydhe]

I don't think it's all that implausible. He could have had them stored in a chest that's only now been unlocked, or a hidden study. You could have a lot of fun if they contradicted established history.

An analogous story involving 20th century treasures: One of the reasons we have nearly all of Buster Keaton's silent films in great shape is that James Mason discovered them when he bought Keaton's old house. I remember reading that they were in or behind a wall, but I'm not sure if that's true. A vault of his films was discovered just a few years ago. I hope something similar happens to Theda Bara; most of her films are considered lost.

 

[onejayhawk]

This was more than just a chest. It was a manor house attic. Of particular interest would be things like letters from the Continental Congress and various personages of the day, relating to the Continental Army and his commission as an officer. If I am not mistaken, he would have needed to bring men with him, so recruiting posters and forms, paybooks, uniform and equipment inventories, etc. In addition there would be personal correspondence, and the business papers associated with a successful planter--ledgers, invoices, order forms, crop figures.

This is all speculation, since the character is fictional. I am trying to get a grasp of the value of such a find to, say, an Ivy League History department and their library's archive section. The papers, culled by a week's looking, is referred to as a apple basketful, from which one literal pound was selected for a permanent exhibit. I expect there would be several graduate thesis from the sorting and cross checking.

J

 

[Serutan]

The discovery of Mycenaean archives at Pylos in the 1950s implies that such a thing is possible.
How probable an is another question.

 

[EgonSpengler]

This is a line from a story, "Who knew a Continental Army Colonel in the family tree could be such fun?

Background. This is a fictional family, from a fictional small New Jersey city. They have a house in the country, by a lake, in prime farm and orchard land. The first house was constructed when "Benjamin Franklin was a boy." You get an old, established family, and a place to accumulate papers and artifacts.

Enter grad students. They spend a week gathering a bushel basket (literally) full of notes, receipts, diaries, letters and other papers. The owner of the home agrees to allow the University to scan everything and to keep one pound of physical paper for a display.

Two questions:

1) How plausible is the scenario? By that I mean discovering a large amount of well preserved papers of an officer from the Revolutionary War.

2) What would it be worth in historical and literal terms?

J

Princeton University is one of the original American colleges, pre-dating the Revolution (Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and a few others that I can't remember). I don't know anything about their history department, but I'm sure they have one. You could drop a professor an email, tell him you're writing a story, get his take on the idea, whether Princeton itself keeps archives of this sort. A librarian could tell you how documents might survive a couple of centuries without having been cared for.

One thing to keep in mind, if it makes any difference to your story, is that prime farm and orchard land in Colonial America was different than it is today. A lot of the forests that were cut down for farm land back then have grown back since farming moved West. It sounds counter-intuitive (to me), but there are more forests today in places like New England than there were in Colonial days.

 

[onejayhawk]

Princeton University is one of the original American colleges, pre-dating the Revolution (Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and a few others that I can't remember). I don't know anything about their history department, but I'm sure they have one. You could drop a professor an email, tell him you're writing a story, get his take on the idea, whether Princeton itself keeps archives of this sort. A librarian could tell you how documents might survive a couple of centuries without having been cared for.

One thing to keep in mind, if it makes any difference to your story, is that prime farm and orchard land in Colonial America was different than it is today. A lot of the forests that were cut down for farm land back then have grown back since farming moved West. It sounds counter-intuitive (to me), but there are more forests today in places like New England than there were in Colonial days.

Interesting idea. US News ranks Princeton tied for #1 in graduate history, with Yale and Berkley. Princeton ranks top 10 in colonial history. The story actually references Dartmouth, which is another Ivy League school, founded 1769.

The land is developed not reforested. About 10 acres of the original parcel is left as the manor grounds. For example, the original grant included the entire lake. Four parcels with lake frontage were split off at various times. I envision legal battles as the lake shrank due to irrigation.

J

 

[Evie]

(Side note: the other four colonial colleges (besides the five already named) are William and Mary, Columbia, Rutgers and U of Pennsylvania.