Correspondence, land papers, receipts, photographs, genealogies, scrapbooks, and other volumes documenting the history of the Boylston and Salley families and the town of Salley in Aiken county, S.C. Boylston items primarily document the family of Austin Boylston (1802-1880) and Mary Reed Boylston (1801-1877). Austin and Mary Reed Boylston's son George William Boylston and his wife Caroline Riley Boylston (1844-1913) are heavily represented in the collection, mainly through correspondence and receipts. A photograph album containing over eighty portraits of Austin and Mary Boylston's descendants includes members of the Crum, Staley, and Phillips families and the family of Austin's brother Jason Boylston (b.1801). Salley family items, mostly legal and land papers, pertain mainly to the descendants of Howell Allan Salley (1835-1894) and Eugenia Haseltine Corbitt (1838-1894), particularly their sons Francis Eugene Salley (1871-1930), Oscar Jacob Salley (1873-1928), and Bird Salley (1879-1933). The majority of Salley correspondence in the collection belonged to Bird Salley's wife, Maggie Pridgen Salley (1880-1961). A number of items not immediately relating to the Boylston and Salley families shed light upon the town of Salley, from a copy of Salley's incorporation papers, to a series of scrapbooks documenting the Salley Chitlin Strut from 1966 to 1992. The 1890 poll list for "School Election in Salley" contains the names of 180 voters. The original 1898 Muster Out Lists for the Bamburg Guards of Bamburg, S. C., and the Palmetto Rifles of Aiken, S.C., including Salley men, can be found in the Boylston and Salley Family Papers. Also available is the Salley Town Council Minute Book covering 4 May 1908 to 6 Nov. 1917. Another item of note to those interested in Salley is the documentation supporting the 1997 nomination of the town to the National Register of Historic Places. Besides the Salleys and Boylstons, others prominently featured in the collection include the West, Dick, and the Jones families. The West family files consist mainly of correspondence written during World War I from brothers Jerome and Holley West to their father Perry West (1853-1926) and younger brother Lawton West (1897-1963). The family of Angus Fulton Dicks (1856-1935) is represented by correspondence, photographs, and various memorabilia. Jones family material consists of letters written from 1964 to 1972 to Ernest and Ruth Jones from Beverly Hills by their daughter Madelyn Earle Jones (1919-1999), better known as Hollywood's Lois Collier.
