Western Reserve Historical Society

Manuscripts Relating to the Early History of the Western Reserve, 1795-1869, was the first collection of manuscripts to be assembled by the Western Reserve Historical Society, and its provenance is closely intertwined with the circumstances of the institution's founding. Chiefly responsible for the acquisition of the materials comprising the collection was Charles W. Whittlesey, the Society's first president. According to the Society's second annual report (1869), Whittlesey assembled the collection from a variety of different sources and by several means: he purchased the papers of the Connecticut Land Company under the authority of the Cuyahoga County commissioners, solicited accounts and original manuscripts from early settlers and their descendants, and added documents that he and some earlier enthusiasts had gathered as their own personal collections. Prominent among these latter additions were the materials collected by John Barr and Leonard Case for an earlier, failed historical society. Both Whittlesey and Barr used the materials which came to comprise this collection to write their accounts of the history of Cleveland, Ohio, which were published in 1867 and 1846, respectively. The documents appear to have been bound together in the order they were received, and by 1870, numbered fifteen volumes. The remaining eight volumes were certainly collected before Whittlesey's death in 1886. Much later, the bound volumes were cut apart and the individual documents were placed in folders and boxes, but kept in their original order. The current arrangement of the documents into more rational series based on material type and subject has thus altered the collection's original sequence. Appendix II is a summary of the relations between the current and earlier modes of arrangement.

click here to view the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History entry for the Connecticut Land Company

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