Spencer, native of Columbus, Ga., was president of six railroads, including the Baltimore and Ohio, 1887-1888, and the Southern, 1894-1906. He was a director of at least ten railroads and of several banks and other companies. Through 1869 the papers consist of personal correspondence while Samuel Spencer was at the Georgia Miliary Academy, serving in the Confederate Army, and at the universities of Georgia and Virginia. Beginning in 1870 there is both personal and business correspondence and a large quantity of business papers, including company reports, surveys, financial statements, bills, receipts, legal papers, lists of stockholders, engineering notes, scrapbooks, and other items pertaining to many of the railroads for which Spencer was engineer, manager, or director, in particular the Baltimore & Ohio, Southern, Savannah & Memphis, and Long Island roads, and to other companies with which he was connected, including the Columbus (Ga.) water works; Pittsburgh & Chicago Gas & Coal Co;, West Virginia Oil Co.; two coke manufacturing firms; the Union Stockyard Company of Chicago; Westinghouse Electric Corporation of Pittsburgh, including correspondence with George Westinghouse; and New York bankers Drexel, Morgan & Company, for whom he was the railroad expert. Other correspondents include many national business and political leaders of the post Civil War period, among them his father-in- law, Henry Lewis Benning (1814-1875), Georgia Supreme Court justice and Confederate brigadier general. Also included are Spencer's detailed letters while traveling in the western United States and Mexico, 1885, and materials, 1915-1919, of his son, Henry B. Spencer, relating to the Tennessee Railway Company. A scrapbook contains clippings, correspondence, and speeches on railroad regulation, 1905-1906.
