Cornelia Phillips Spencer, writer and community leader of Chapel Hill, N.C., was the daughter of University of North Carolina mathematics professor James Phillips (1792-1867) and Judith Vermeule Phillips (1796-1881), wife of lawyer James Monroe Spencer (1827-1861), and mother of Julia Spencer Love (b. 1859), who married Harvard University mathematician James Lee Love (1860-1950). The collection includes correspondence, writings, pictures, and other materials relating to Cornelia Phillips Spencer and her family. Much of the material for the period 1866-1883 concerns Chapel Hill friends and neighbors and the effect of Reconstruction on the University of North Carolina. Included are a few letters to Cornelia from her father, 1856-1863, and from North Carolina Governor Zebulon Baird Vance, 1865-1872. From April to October 1884, there are many letters to Cornelia from her daughter Julia, who was traveling and studying in England and Germany. Over one-third of the correspondence consists of letters between Cornelia in Chapel Hill and Julia in Cambridge, Mass., 1890-1894. Letters concern personal and public aspects of life in both college towns, the pregnancy and stillbirth experienced by Julia in March 1891, the lives of faculty members at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard, and domestic affairs of the North Carolina and Massachusetts branches of the family. Writings include many songs, poems, articles, and memorials by Cornelia. Volumes include Cornelia's diaries, 1853-1908, and her scrapbooks, some of which contain writings by Cornelia. There are also many volumes of James Phillips's lecture notes. Pictures are chiefly of family members. Also included are typed transcriptions of most of the correspondence, as well as transcriptions of letters, writings, and other materials of Cornelia from published and manuscript sources, many of which were produced in conjunction with Louis Round Wilson's editing of Cornelia's papers for publication.
