Five of Binghamton University’s Civil War Collections have added to New York Heritage, a research portal for students, educators, historians, genealogists, and anyone else who is interested in learning more about the people, places and institutions of New York State. The site provides free access to more than 170 distinct digital collections, totalling hundreds of thousands of items including photographs, maps and letters.
The five Binghamton University Civil War Collections that have been added are the Anna E. Wilcox Collection, the Francis M. and Henry H. Stone Collection, the Joseph H. Treyz Collection of Civil War Patriotic Envelopes, the Lewis H. Brown Collection, and the Patrick Casey Collection. Included in these collections are letters, patriotic envelopes and diaries. Each collection offers insight into life during the Civil War which raged from 1861 to 1865 to determine the survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy.
In total the Binghamton University Libraries Civil War Collections consist of seventeen individual collections of materials. Together the collections contain over 1700 letters, diaries, photographs, account books, postcards, and other ephemera which date from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, but are centered on the Civil War years 1861-1865.
Letters are by far the largest component of Binghamton’s collections and many of the letters were written by soldiers at the front, or in Army hospitals, to their family and friends back home. At its core the Civil War Collections are a local history resource with emphasis on collections pertaining to the counties in the immediate Binghamton, New York area, that is Broome, Chemung, Chenango, Cortland, Delaware, Otsego, Tioga, and Tompkins Counties.
Collections of particular interest from outside those counties have also been included, such as a collection from Montgomery County which consists of letters written by Ten Eyck Fonda, the grandfather of the actor Henry Fonda.
The collections are located in Special Collections located on the second floor of the Bartle Library. For more information on Binghamton University’s Civil War Collections and other local history collections, contact Local History Bibliographer, Yvonne Deligato, at 607- 777-6459 or by email: deligato@binghamton.edu.
Visit the Binghamton University Collections in New York Heritage here