Julia Wilbur's Diaries and Letters--Now Digitized!
My “Julia Wilbur project” began in 2010. The Alexandria Archaeology Museum wanted a transcription of the diaries of this abolitionist who spent the Civil War in Alexandria, Virginia. Several volunteers had begun, using a microfilmed version at the Local History Collections of the Alexandria Library. I persevered, fortunately, but I can see why the endeavor thwarted their intentions. (The originals are at Haverford College)
Julia Wilbur, circa 1860., from Julia Wilbur Papers, Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford College.
Stage One: A Patchwork Affair
At first, I parked myself at a microfilm machine and printed out hard copies of pages—at 25 cents a page! Then I learned that one of the readers could download jpg versions to a thumb drive. I got into a rhythm—focus in on a page, scan image, save, on to the next one, repeat process. It took XX (I blotted out the exact number) seconds per scan, multiplied by XX pages. In other words, a long time, and that didn’t include the actual transcribing when I got home.
The Museum also had a few of Julia’s letters written to fellow members of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (RLASS), who sponsored her work in Alexandria. (The originals live in the William Clements Library at the University of Michigan.) These I supplemented with requests to the Clements for photocopies of her annual reports to the group and other RLASS materials.
As my transcription project transitioned to a book, I visited Haverford. As I have written about previously, I discovered other diaries that she wrote, voluminous numbers of pages. The nonprofit Friends of Alexandria Archaeology and Haverford eventually shared the cost of scanning many of these diaries, roughly from 1860 to 1872, and we transcribed them. (The years 1860 to mid-1866 are online through the Office of Historic Alexandria and FOAA, and are searchable).
For additional RLASS materials at the Clements, I contracted with a fellow biographer, Christina Karas, whom I had met at a conference and lived in Michigan.
And thus, as mostly self-financed writers do, I patched together as complete a repository of primary source materials as I could from these two libraries, along with other research in Rochester, Washington, and Alexandria.
Fast forward to 2020, and great news for the subset of people intensely interested in Julia Wilbur but also for the larger world interested in eyewitness accounts of 19th-century civil and women’s rights, everyday living, early federal government service for women, and much more.
The collections at Haverford and University of Michigan are online! Here’s a little about each one and how to access them.
Haverford: Julia Wilbur Papers, Mostly Diaries
From Julia’s 1865 diary about the assassination of President Lincoln, Original at Haverford College.
The originals live in the Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College thanks to a gift from her great-nephew Douglas Steere, a long-time Haverford professor. From the “Scope and Content Note” that describes the collection (emphasis mine):
This collection is comprised primarily of Julia Wilbur’s personal journals, which span from 1844 to 1895. It is important to note that Julia’s journals vary in type. The first journal variety, which includes the years 1856-57 and 1860-95, are pocket-sized, individual books. The second journal style is larger in dimension than the first set. They are not bound books, but instead are individual pages that have been sewn together. These journals go from 1844 to 1873. There is some overlap in time among the different journal varieties, specifically for 1856-1857 and 1860-1873. Comparing corresponding entries reveals generally similar content, often with further elaboration in the entries of the second journal type due to the increase in writing space. Julia also wrote what she refers to as “journal briefs” for the years 1844 through 1862. These briefs offer summaries of her entries for those year and presumably represent what Julia saw as the most significant events that had occurred during those times. There are various other, miscellaneous items included in this collection as well. More specifically, there is a brief journal kept by Julia’s sister, Mary L. Van Buskirk, during an 1881 trip to Washington D.C. There is also a compilation of loose journal pages that cover 1906 and 1907, as well as a bound journal written by Buskirk in 1908. There are two pictures of Julia in this collection in addition to a photocopy of an 1865 letter written by Julia to her sister, Mary, about the assassination of Lincoln. Finally, there is a letter written by the great niece of Julia Wilbur that summarizes many aspects of Julia’s life [My note: many of which are inaccurate].
Further descriptions are in a Finding Aid. The library has organized the physical papers in six boxes. it was a highlight of my work to sit and pore through the originals, but….the scanned versions are indeed welcome.
Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore have connected many of their online holdings through TriCollege Archives & Manuscripts. Julia's digitized papers are now nicely situated in a larger collection repository called “In Her Own Right—Women Activists, 1820-1920.” We can assume she would love that!
To reach Julia’s diaries online takes a bit of navigating, but you can begin by going to the finding aid and clicking by type of material and date range in “Collection Organization” on the right-hand side.
University of Michigan: RLASS Materials, Including Julia Wilbur’s Letters
From the RLASS Papers Finding Aid, William Clements Library, University of Michigan
Christina recently emailed me to tell me that the Clements Library digitized the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society collection. Unlike Haverford with its clear linkage to a Wilbur family member, the provenance—that is, how Rochester papers ended up in Ann Arbor—is uncertain (although many people, including three of Julia’s siblings, moved from upstate New York to Michigan).
The collection has two boxes, plus a box of oversized materials, mostly newspapers. From the Collection Scope and Content Note (again, emphasis mine):
The Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society papers contain only a small portion of what must at one time have been a much larger collection. As a society devoted to the immediate abolition of slavery, the antislavery movement forms the context of most of the correspondence in the collection, but the members of the society were individually and collectively involved in the education of freedmen and in other movements, including women's rights. As a result, the collection offers a broad perspective on the mentality and activity of a small group of progressive northern women involved in the reform of what they saw as the worst inequities in American society….Freedmen's education was a major concern of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, and is discussed extensively by several correspondents. The single most frequent correspondent in the collection is Julia A. Wilbur, writing while working with freedmen in Alexandria, Va., 1862-1865. Wilbur writes long and vivid letters describing the miserable living conditions found among the freedmen, their want of clothing and shelter, and she describes several individual cases. Wilbur also met and became familiar with the renowned ex-slave and author, Harriet Jacobs. The situation that Wilbur describes in Virginia verges on the chaotic, with corruption at the highest levels, dissension among those in charge of contraband matters, and many in the military reluctant or unwilling to take any responsibility. She was a perceptive observer of the progress of the war, Southern citizenry, and of the destruction that the war had inflicted upon Virginia. Her official reports to the Society, which are more general and less pointed than her private correspondence, were published in the Society's published annual reports.
Most of the saved letters were written to Anna Barnes, the society’s treasurer, no doubt knowing that Anna would share them with other supporters.
To reach the RLASS papers online, scroll to the bottom of the Finding Aid. Each document is described at the bottom of the Finding Aid, along with a link “View Digital Surrogate.”
A Less-Unknown Woman
When I began writing about Julia Wilbur, I knew historians had used her diaries and letters in books about the era. I would turn to an index—Wilbur, Julia—to find a few pages with her observations and experiences. I hope these two digitized collections help spread her name and work further.
