This autograph album was assembled by Helen Church, Jamaica Plains, Mass. It includes mounted signatures, letters, calling cards, drawings and other documents. Many of the autographs are from letters addressed to Helen's father, Henry Augustus Church (1825-1892), the treasurer of the Ogdensburgh and Lake Champlain Railroad Company. Included among the autographs and letters mounted in the album are: Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Dean Howells, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Cardinal James Gibbons, Phillips Brooks, Horace Greeley, Edwin Booth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Louisa May Alcott, Theodore Tilton and Hannah Whitall Smith. Also included are photographs of: Edwin Booth, Kate Field, Hannah Whitall Smith and Christine Nilsson. Among the items laid in are six bonds from the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company (1840), a bond from the Republic of Texas (1839) and the May 19, 1824 issue of The Independent chronicle and Boston patriot, legal documents of the Pollard family of Massachusetts (1791-1815), a list of debts of the estate of John Burger (1792) and a letter from L. M. Russell in San Francisco to his wife, Susan, in Wayland, Mass. (1850). There are also handwritten indexes to the some of the contents of the volume.
