The University of Chicago Library > The Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center > Finding Aids > Guide to the Reuben T. Durrett Collection of Edmund Lyne Estate Records 1786-1889
© 2016 University of Chicago Library
| Title: | Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Edmund Lyne Estate Records |
|---|---|
| Dates: | 1786-1889 |
| Size: | 0.5 linear feet (1 box) |
| Repository: |
Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center |
| Abstract: | Reuben Thomas Durrett (1824-1913), lawyer, manuscript and book collector, and Kentucky historian. Edmund Lyne (d. 1791), was an entrepreneur and operator of salt licks, a whiskey still, and a ferry service in Blue Licks, Kentucky. The Reuben T. Durrett Collection of the Edmund Lyne Estate Papers consists of business records from the latter part of Lyne's life and documents related to the execution of his will by Harry Innes. The collection contains account books (1786-1791), estate records (1774-1804), and papers related to the care of Lyne's slaves after his death, in preparation for their manumission. Also includes a letter (1889) that mentions that the Lyne papers were found among Harry Innes' possessions. Materials span the period 1786-1889. |
The collection is open for research.
When quoting material from this collection, the preferred citation is: Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Edmund Lyne Estate Records, [Box #, Folder #], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
The existence of the Durrett library first came to the attention of the University of Chicago through William E. Dodd, a professor of American history at the University who had consulted the library as a student. Like other faculty members of the Division of the Social Sciences early in the century, Dodd was concerned about the University's lack of extensive research materials for history and related subjects, and since he was aware of Durrett's advanced age, he persuaded A. C. McLaughlin, also of the history department, to accompany him to Louisville in June, 1910, to see the collection and to make discreet inquiries about plans for its disposition. The two found Durrett himself uncertain about his plans, but learned that the Durrett family opposed making a donation of the collection, and that they were in communication with Princeton University and the University of Illinois about selling the library.
Dodd himself was very enthusiastic about the research potential which Durrett's library represented, and won the support of many of his colleagues on the social science faculties in his efforts to persuade President Judson to consider the purchase by the University of the entire library, numbering some 30,000 volumes. Convinced that the collection would be a valuable addition to the University's holdings, but wary of the expense involved, Judson agreed cautiously to investigate the idea. Although Dodd and his colleagues were anxious to conclude the agreement quickly, fearing competition from other would-be purchasers or the dispersal of the collection upon Durrett's apparently imminent death, the task of deciding upon a fair offer was made difficult by the fact that the collection had never been adequately catalogued.
Durrett's own suggestion made in December, 1912 of $45,000 seemed high, so in February 1913, the University engaged Walter Lichtenstein, a Northwestern University librarian who had previously acted as purchasing agent for the University of Chicago libraries, to assess the value of the Durrett collection. Lichtenstein's report was submitted to President Judson on February 21, 1913, following a trip to Louisville to sample the collection.
The assessment, made on terms of commercial market value rather than scholarly significance, divided Durrett's library into four parts. Some 20,000 bound volumes (including 500 volumes of Kentuckiana) he estimated at $7,200. Two hundred fifty file folders of pamphlet material had no apparent commercial value. Numerous manuscripts and newspapers were difficult to assess but Lichtenstein thought they could be fairly purchased for $15,000. A collection of maps was estimated to have a value around $50. Lichtenstein's estimate, therefore, totaled $22,000-$22,500, considerably less than Durrett's own. When the University authorized Lichtenstein to make this offer to the Durrett family, however, they accepted it, apparently favoring Chicago as the repository of their collection. The purchase sum, which was too high to be taken from the University's ordinary budget, was raised among outside donors, and under Lichtenstein's supervision, the library was dismantled and shipped to Chicago by early May. It filled 287 large packing crates. Its arrival provoked considerable comment in the Louisville and Chicago press, and almost immediately the University began to receive research inquiries from scholars and requests from several libraries for copies of some of the Durrett material to add to their own collections.
In his report Lichtenstein had warned President Judson that considerable effort and expense would be required to process the collection once it was at the University. His warning proved to be justified. Aside from the massive undertaking of unpacking, sorting, and cataloguing the collection, much of the material was found to be in poor condition, requiring cleaning, repair, and binding or rebinding. To facilitate the efficient processing of the Durrett acquisition, the entire operation was assigned to Edward A. Henry of the library staff, who, with the help of his assistants, was to devote most of his attention to the Durrett project for some seven years. It was decided that duplicates should be disposed of, that a number of Filson Club possessions in Durrett's library should be returned to the Club, and that most of the non-manuscript material in the collection would be distributed according to subject matter among the University's various departmental libraries. On several occasions between 1913 and 1937, items of an official character were returned to Kentucky upon request, including records of Jefferson County, journals of Kentucky constitutional conventions, and certain manuscripts and photographs of the Filson Club identified by the club's president, R. C. Ballard Thurston. Most of Henry's time seems to have been devoted to preparing the material for this dispersal. His assignment was expanded in 1914 when the University purchased a collection totaling 436 volumes of Kentucky newspapers and miscellaneous books from Mrs. Joel R. Lyle, sister of Robert C. Boggs of Lexington, Kentucky. It was deemed appropriate to merge the Boggs-Lyle acquisition with the Durrett, and the two were processed together.
By the end of the 1915-16 academic year, about 9,000 of the Durrett and Boggs-Lyle volumes had been processed and distributed to the departmental libraries. It was then that Henry and his staff turned some of their attention to the manuscripts--that is, to the material comprising the Durrett Collection as described in this guide. At that time the Durrett manuscripts were apparently divided into four large groups--the Joel Tanner Hart Papers, the Joshua Lacy Wilson Papers, miscellaneous manuscripts, and miscellaneous separately bound items--either mounted in scrapbooks or bound together. A card catalog was compiled for at least the first three of these groups.
The Durrett Collection remained in this state until the mid-1950s. By then it had been incorporated within the holdings of the Department of Special Collections (1951), and it became clear that reorganization of the manuscripts was necessary. Paul Angle, a member of the staff of the Chicago Historical Society, who had surveyed the University of Chicago's manuscript collection as a consultant in 1944, had pointed out that the Durrett miscellaneous bound manuscripts in particular were of little use to scholars as they were then arranged and described. Moreover, the Special Collections staff had observed that the mountings and bindings done by Henry's staff were detrimental to the lives of the manuscripts, and that the existing catalog and descriptions provided inadequate access to the documents. The manuscripts, therefore, were removed from their bindings and divided into smaller and more coherent sub-collections.
In the 1970s, an effort was undertaken to edit the 1956 guide, to enhance the descriptions of the Durrett codices for greater detail and accuracy, and to differentiate between transcripts and original manuscript material bound together in the codices. Manuscript material also received conservation treatment. In 1983, another attempt was made to write a comprehensive guide to the entire collection. This guide remained in use until 2015. The current guide was completed in 2016.
Colonel Edmund Lyne was a frontier entrepreneur of the late eighteenth century, who lived and owned land in Blue Licks, which became a part of Nicholas County, Kentucky. He operated salt licks, a whiskey still, and a ferry service until his death in November or early December, 1791.
The collection is primarily of interest for what it reveals about the life-style of a man in Lyne's circumstances, his standard of living and his role in the commodity-exchange economy of the region. Lyne dealt in buffalo, beef, pork, basic foodstuffs, and whiskey. He traded salt for a number of items, including shoes, tallow, livestock, linen, and china. Chores connected with his various entrepreneurial projects were done either by slaves (manumitted at his death) or by hired laborers. As a rule little cash was exchanged, although Lyne did use it to purchase paper, a beehive, a butter mold, and wine glasses.
The Lyne Estate Records consist primarily of Lyne's own business records from the last years of his life and of various papers related to the execution of his will by Harry Innes, a United States District Judge in the state of Kentucky and a personal friend of Lyne.
A letter from G.S. Todd of Frankfort, Kentucky to Mary S. Payne (Folder 1) suggests that the Lyne Papers may have come to Durrett through Mrs. Payne. According to this letter, she received the papers from Mr. Todd, who found them among some Harry Innes papers then in his possession.
The remaining papers have been arranged in three categories – account books, general estate records, and manumission papers.
The account books (Folders 2-6) are bookkeeping records of Lyne's income and during the five-year period from 1786 to 1791.
The general estate papers (Folders 7-9), consist of various business papers (bills, receipts, letters, etc.) relevant to Lyne's affairs during his lifetime and to the settlement of his estate after his death. These materials span the period 1774-1804, though some are undated.
The manumission papers (Folder 10) contains papers related to the care of Lyne's slaves after his death in preparation for their manumission, according to Lyne's testamentary wish. Most of these papers are records of Innes' reimbursement from the Lyne estate for the expenses he incurred in providing clothing, shelter, medical care, and trade training for slave children. Also included are a judicial note concerning the emancipation process and a record of a chancery court case.
Researchers interested in topics represented in the Durrett Collection should check the author, title, or subject headings relevant to their interests in the Library catalog for potentially useful books and pamphlets from the Durrett Library, which were dispersed among the existing departmental libraries at the time of acquisition. Some of these items have since been transferred to the Rare Books collection and to the Reuben T. Durrett Collection of Broadsides, Pamphlets, and Leaflets, in the Special Collections Research Center.
The Durrett rare book collections include works of literature, travel and description, early histories of Kentucky such as Mann Butler's, biographies, legislative acts, and other legal documents.
Examples include Henry McMurtrie's Sketches of Louisville and Its Environs (1819); a collection of humorous verses, The Kentucky Miscellany, by Thomas Johnson, Jr. (1821), one of two known copies of the fourth edition, the first known to survive; and The Confession of Jereboam O. Beauchamp ... (1826).
Among the newspapers are 135 titles published in Kentucky, beginning in 1788 with the Kentucky Gazette, the first newspaper established in the state. Other important titles include the Mirror, the Palladium, the Guardian of Freedom, the Farmer's Library or Ohio Intelligencer, and numerous campaign newspapers such as The Patriot and The Spirit of '76 from 1826.
Included in the American Paper Currency Collection in the Special Collections Research Center is Durrett's collection of confederate currency, among which are many examples of notes issued by the Bank of Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Correspondence, reports, and clippings concerning the acquisition of the Reuben T. Durrett Collection for the University of Chicago are found in the University of Chicago Library Records Addenda.
In addition, the following collections contain material related in subject matter to various portions of the Durrett Collection:
Codex MS 798 Lettres de Mr. Cahusac, Américain, juge de paix à Fleurance, 1806-1836
Church History Documents Collection
Codex MS 790, Letters to Virgil David, 1828-1838
Douglas, Stephan A. Papers
English, William H. Papers
Ethno-History Collection
Lafayette Manuscripts
Lafayette-Bonaventure. Collection
Lane, Ebenezer, Family. Papers
Lewis, Fielding. Papers
Robertson, Wyndham. Papers
All Durrett sub-collections are as follows:
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Boggs Family. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Boone Family. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Broadsides, Broadsheets, Pamphlets, and Leaflets
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Christopher Columbus Graham. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. George and William Croghan. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. George Nicholas. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. George Rogers Clark. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Government Records
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Edmund Lyne Estate. Records
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. James Wilkinson. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Joel Tanner Hart. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Joshua Lacey Wilson. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Lewis Family. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Louisville, Kentucky Board of Trustees. Records
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Mann Butler. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Michael Walsh Cluskey. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Miscellaneous Manuscripts and Codices
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Portraits, Illustrations, and Cartographic Material
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Reuben T. Durrett. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Richard H. Collins. Papers
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Richard Jouett Menefee Collection on Matthew Harris Jouett
Durrett, Reuben T. Collection. Shelby Family. Papers
| Box 1 Folder 1 | H.S. Todd, Frankfort, KY, to Mary S. Payne - May 31, 1889 – A.L.S. 2 p. |
| Box 1 Folder 2 | Account Books – 1786-1787 |
| Box 1 Folder 3 | Account Books – 1786-1791 |
| Box 1 Folder 4 | Account Books – 1787-1789 |
| Box 1 Folder 5 | Account Books – 1789-1790 |
| Box 1 Folder 6 | Account Books – 1790-1791 |
| Box 1 Folder 7 | General Estate papers – Receipts, Bills, Memos, 1774-1791 |
| Box 1 Folder 8 | General Estate papers – Estate Inventories, and Memos, 1792-1793 |
| Box 1 Folder 9 | General Estate papers – Estate Inventories, Memos, Court Documents, 1794-1804 |
| Box 1 Folder 10 | General Estate papers – undated |
| Box 1 Folder 11 | Manumission Papers – Receipts, Judicial Note and Chancery Court Record, 1790-1804 |