Letter from Oliver Wendell to John Thornton Kirkland, 1817

One letter offering Harvard President Kirkland a donation of 100 dollars to acquire a "handsome Christening Cup or Baptismal Basin" for the new College Church, which held services in University Hall.

Note from William Croswell to President Kirkland and the Corporation of Harvard College, 1817-1821

This folder contains six documents: three drafts of a brief March 10, 1817, note to Harvard President John Kirkland, with two of the drafts followed by an October 25, 1819, note to the Harvard College Corporation concerning Croswell's work on Harvard's Library Catalogue.

[Letter from William Emerson to John Sale], 1819 December 3

Letter signed by William Emerson requesting John Sale pay the scholarship funds. The author of the letter is likely the son of the Reverend William Emerson, who died in 1811. William Emerson (1801-1868) received an AB from Harvard in 1818; his brother Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard AB 1821) received the Penn Scholarship from 1817 to 1820.

Guarantee of financial support for student James Savage, signed by William Tudor and John Cooper, 1799 July 25

This legal agreement, a guarantee of financial support for entering student James Savage (A.B. 1803), was signed on July 25, 1799 by his two guarantors, William Tudor and John Cooper. The document was also signed by two witnesses, William Tudor's sons John Henry Tudor and Frederic Tudor. The agreement specifies that, in the event of Savage's failure to settle all financial obligations to the President and Fellows of Harvard College during the course of his studies, the two guarantors would be responsible for a payment of two hundred ounces of silver. It seems that the Tudors and Cooper were relatives of Savage, thus explaining their desire to assure his entry to Harvard by entering into this financial obligation.

Letters from William Tudor to John Thornton Kirkland,

Three letters, one in which Tudor suggests persuading the Episcopal Church to send a bishop to reside in Cambridge and establish a divinity professorship as a means to attract students from other states who are wary of Unitarianism. Tudor also makes inquiries regarding the title of Doctor for a Reverend Chaplin and asks about college records of James Otis.

Letters from Benjamin Welles to John Henry Tudor, 1799-1801

Benjamin Welles wrote these six letters to his friend and classmate, John Henry Tudor, between 1799 and 1801. Four of the letters are dated, and the dates of the other two can be deduced from their contents. Welles wrote Tudor four times in September 1799, at the onset of their senior year at Harvard, in an attempt to clear up hurt feelings and false rumors that he believed had caused a chill in their friendship. The cause of the rift is never fully explained, though Welles alludes to "a viper" and "villainous hypocrite" who apparently spread rumors and fueled discord between the two friends. In one letter, Welles asserts that "College is a rascal's Elysium - or the feeling man's hell." In another he writes: "College, Tudor, is a furnace to the phlegmatic, & a Greenland to thee feeling man; it has an atmosphere which breathes contagion to the soul [...] Villains fatten here. College is the embryo of hell." Whatever their discord, the wounds were apparently eventually healed; in a letter written June 26, 1800, Welles writes to ask Tudor about his impending speech at Commencement exercises. In an October 29, 1801 letter, Welles writes to Tudor in Philadelphia (where he appears to have traveled in attempts to recover his failing health) and expresses strong wishes for his friend's recovery and return to Boston. This letter also contains news of their classmate Washington Allston's meeting with painters Henry Fuseli and Benjamin West.

Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, 1817 (Raster Image)

This layer is a georeferenced raster image of the historic paper map entitled: Chart of Boston Harbour : surveyed in 1817, by Alexr. S. Wadsworth ; by order of Come. William Bainbridge, to whom it is most respectfully inscribed ; Allen & Gaw, sc. Scale [1:18,000]. It was published by John Melish in 1819. Covers Boston Harbor, Massachusetts and adjacent lands. The image inside the map neatline is georeferenced to the surface of the earth and fit to the Massachusetts State Plane Coordinate System, Mainland Zone (in Feet) (Fipszone 2001). All map collar and inset information is also available as part of the raster image, including any inset maps, profiles, statistical tables, directories, text, illustrations, or other information associated with the principal map. This nautical chart shows coastal features such as rocks, channels, points, coves, islands, and more. Depths are shown by soundings and shading. It also shows land features such as roads, drainage, selected buidings, and more. Relief is shown by hachures. This layer is part of a selection of digitally scanned and georeferenced historic maps of Massachusetts from the Harvard Map Collection. These maps typically portray both natural and manmade features. The selection represents a range of regions, originators, ground condition dates (1755-1922), scales, and purposes. The digitized selection includes maps of: the state, Massachusetts counties, town surveys, coastal features, real property, parks, cemeteries, railroads, roads, public works projects, etc.