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The Duke law firm papers include correspondence, case files, legal, insuarance, and financial records, as well as ledgers. The files provide extensive documentation of a small-town family practice. Since the insurance business and the Dukes's family business affairs were handled in the same office as the law practice, these files had remained with the legal files. The family correspondence found with these papers was transferred to Special Collections in Alderman Library.

This collection contains 268 letters Virginia Scott Cocke wrote to David Russell Lyman, whom she would marry in 1905. The letters date from 1898 to 1905 and document their courtship. Also included are photographs, a postcard, a bookplate, an album, marriage certificates, transcripts of the letter, and a thumb drive.

The practice of Long and Sadler, as documented in this collection, was characteristic of legal work in a small town in the early twentieth century. The cases are virtually all civil, primarily trusts and estates, real estate, insurance, torts, and divorce. From the earliest period of Long's practice, there are very few documents: one case file, two bound abstracts of title, and a ledger book dating from the early 1900s. After 1914, Long's time was apparently taken up primarily by his duties as Commissioner of Accounts, although he also served as attorney in trust and estate cases, and handled some divorces. The bulk of the cases documented here, therefore, are Sadler's.