The Church History Documents Collection consists primarily of typescript copies and photostats of material that was gathered under the auspices of the Church History Research Fund and in conjunction with the writing of William Warren Sweet's Religion on the American Frontier, a four-volume set of source materials on religion in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection contains many of those documents in unedited form, as well as some documents that were not published in the series, notably, many of those among the miscellaneous documents at the end of the collection. Most of the papers were at one time bound and held in the Rare Books Collection; they were de-catalogued and placed in the Manuscripts Collection in 1967. The collection is unique and should be approached for what it is: an extensive collection of source material in early American church history-and not seen mainly as copies or transcripts having no intrinsic worth of their own.
The papers are mainly transcripts or photocopies of record books, journals, minutes, miscellaneous documents, etc., of a number of early frontier churches, along with diaries, correspondence, notebooks, journals, sermons, and miscellaneous notes of people important in frontier religious history; Most of the material concerns activity in Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and several of the original thirteen colonies. Well-known names represented here include Flavel Bascom, Stephen Peet (the elder), Thomas Haskins, Benjamin Lakin, Joshua Wilson, Wilhelm Loehe, and George Whitefield.
From the guide to the Church History Documents. Collection, ca. 1750-1906, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)
