Alexander Elliot, lumberman of Fayetteville, Cumberland County, N.C., who also served as a colonel in the militia, was a member of the North Carolina House of Commons, 1824-1825, and the North Carolina Senate, 1826. The collection is chiefly letters documenting Elliot's lumbering business. Many items are from agents in Wilmington, N.C., who handled the timber that Elliot rafted to them via the Cape Fear River. These letters typically include financial statements relating to the shipment and sale of Elliot's lumber. There are also many bills and receipts, some relating to buying and selling slaves. Also included are family letters. Some of these letters are from Elliot's sister, Jane Boylan, who lived in Raleigh, N.C., and wrote in the early 1840s chiefly about family matters. Others are from William Wilkshire Whitfield, Elliot's nephew, who, in the mid-1840s, wrote to his uncle from Chapel Hill where he was a student at the University of North Carolina. Other family letters, written in the mid- to late-1840s, are from family members who had moved to Columbus, Lowndes County, Miss., to farm. These letters mostly discuss family and agricultural matters, but also include mention of other topics, such as the possibility of slave insurrections in Mississippi and North Carolina. In 1864 and 1865, there are letters to Elliot from a teacher he had hired to provide an education for his children during the Civil War. The volume of materials drops off after the 1860s.
