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[Identification of item], Thomas Lenoir Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
The Thomas Lenoir Papers were acquired by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 1944-1950.
Processed by Rubenstein Library Staff,
Encoded by Jane Metters and Meghan Lyon, September 2011
This collection is minimally processed: materials may not have been ordered and described beyond their original condition.
Descriptive sources and standards used to create this inventory:
This finding aid is NCEAD compliant.
The collection includes 1,977 items and 30 volumes of business and family letters of Colonel Thomas Lenoir (1780-1861), of his father, General William Lenoir (1751-1839), and especially of Colonel Thomas Lenoir's eight children. The earlier papers include legal documents, a stud book, and family letters. Those of John Norwood (1727-1802) contain comments during the late 1790s on the spread and reception of deism in North Carolina and on the political situation in France and England; and one letter of Lewis Williams is concerned with Joseph Seawell Jones's
The majority of the collection, connected directly with Colonel Thomas Lenoir, consists of family papers concerning chiefly the settlement of the William Lenoir estate; the activities of the former's brother, William Ballard Lenoir (1781-1855) in Lenoir, Roane County, Tennessee; and the former's sons, Rufus Theodore and Walter Waightstill Lenoir, who were students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The most valuable letters are those concerning the livestock farming operations of Thomas Isaac Lenoir in Haywood County, North Carolina, before the Civil War.
There are but few Civil War letters. During the postwar period there are letters of Walter Waightstill Lenoir from Crab Orchard probably in Haywood County, and Shulls Mills, Watauga County, North Carolina, containing references to North Carolina politics, including the role of W. W. Holden and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in North Carolina politics in 1866. There are also occasional treatises on diseases of cattle. Included in this collection are letters of the Gwynn family and of the Pickens family of South Carolina, both related to the Lenoirs by marriage; of Rufus Theodore Lenoir and his sons at the University of North Carolina, of Julia A. Oertel, wife of a Protestant Episcopal minister and artist who came from Bavaria, Germany, and settled in Caldwell County, North Carolina, of Rufus T. Lenoir, Jr., as a student at Davis Military School, Winston, North Carolina, in 1893; and of Sarah Joyce Lenoir; and memoranda of farming operations, 1878-1901. There is a genealogical table of the Lenoir family and a slave list.
The volumes contain mercantile records; personal diary of Walter Waightstill Lenoir (1823-1890), started while a student at the University of North Carolina, and concerned also with the death of his wife and his career as an attorney; lists of notes payable; survey records of William Lenoir; account books; and a diary of William Avery Lenoir, 1837-1852 (with gaps), which contains biographical information on Waightstill Avery and his family, a description of Henry Clay's plantation, the construction of turnpikes in North Carolina, and a planned railroad to Tennessee. There are unbound pages from account books, receipts for dues paid the Protestant Episcopal Church, surveyor's field notes and plats made in 1885, legal papers of various types, French notes, deeds, warrants, and records of hearings before justices of the peace. Among the correspondents are W. J. Gingham, Calvin J. Cowles, Charles R. Deems, S. F. Patterson, and Lewis Williams.
These are searchable subject entries for this collection. Performing a search on these subjects in the Duke University Libraries online catalog will bring up other related research materials.
For Lower Creek, Boone Fork, and Hickory Tavern "old boundaries".