Collections

Correspondence, pamphlets, and notes relating to the chemical and salt industries in the Kanawha Valley, and to the industrial development of the region.

Material written and collected by a former curator of the West Virginia and Regional History Collection that includes bibliographies, transcripts, photostats, papers and historical sketches on various aspects of West Virginia history. Items deal with prominent West Virginia University historians, the Civil War, early settlement, industrial growth, and West Virginia University. A number of letters and circulars discuss the West Virginia Historical Society in 1869.

Book manuscripts by John Edmund Stealey III, Distinguished Professor of History at Shepherd University. Born of a prominent Clarksburg family, Stealey is known generally for his work on West Virginia and Appalachia including industrial slavery, antebellum business and industry, nineteenth century United States legal history. He has extended his research and publication range to include early Porfirian Mexico and Civil War era constitutionalism, African American life, and political development in the Border States. Collection includes galley proofs of The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets (1993). An addendum of 2000/09/19 includes the final manuscript, typescript, and galley proof versions of Stealey's book Kanawhan Prelude to Nineteenth-Century Monopoly in the United States (2000), and galley proof of his book The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets (1993). An addendum of 2007/08/27 includes a manuscript copy and final proof copy of Porte Crayon's Mexico: David Hunter Strother's diaries in the early Porfirian era, 1879-1885, edited and authored by John E. Stealey, and floppy discs (2005-2006). For more information about these books, see Scope and Content Note.

Miscellaneous papers concerning the history of the Kanawha Valley salt industry, including correspondence, newspaper clippings and photographs which pertain to the Dickinson Salt Works and Malden, West Virginia. There are a list of salt works on the Kanawha River, clippings on the destruction of the Dickinson Salt Works by fire, and a historical sketch of the Kanawha Valley salt industry.

An agreement between Kanawha County Salt Manufacturers fixing prices and splitting the market. Parties to the agreement include Andrew Donnally, Lewis F. Donnally, William Donnally, William D. Shrewsberry, Henry H. Wood, John D. Lewis, George H. Warth, Job English, James H. Fry, Henry Chappell, Ira Hurt, Richard A. Hurt, Nathaniel B. Wilson, William C. Brooks, Richard C. Lovell, William McMullen, Lewis Ruffner, James S. Brooks, Franklin Noyes, Samuel A. Miller, E.S. Arnold, William J. Rand, John N. Clarkson, Frederick Brooks, Samuel H. Early, John P. Hale, Leonara C. Reger, Gustavus B. Quarrier, William Brigham, and Crockett Engles.