Creator: Blanchard, Elizabeth Amis Cameron, d. 1956.
Collection number: 3367
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Abstract: Elizabeth Amis Cameron Hooper Blanchard (1873-1956), author, art collector, and interior decorator, was related by birth and marriage to the Amis, Hooper, Blanchard, and Butterworth families. Prominent persons represented in the collection include her husband, John Osgood Blanchard (d. ca. 1912); her mother, Mary (“Mamie”) Amis Hooper (b. 1843); and her mother’s three sisters, Elizabeth (“Bettie”) Amis (1837-1872), Sallie Amis Nowland (b. 1841), and Julia Amis (1848-1876). Other prominent family members included the Amis sisters’ parents, Thomas Amis (fl. 1834-1876) and Sarah Davis Amis (d. 1852), and their aunt, Mary Amis Butterworth (fl. 1855-1880), and uncle, Samuel F. Butterworth (fl. 1855-1866). This collection is divided into two parts. Subcollection 3367(A) contains correspondence, notes, memoranda, diary entries, clippings, pictures, and breeding and racing records, all relating to Elizabeth Blanchard’s book, “The Life and Times of Sir Archie: The Story of America’s Greatest Thoroughbred,” as well as a typed draft of the book. Also included in 3367(A) are genealogical materials on the Amis and Dulany families and copies of Amis and Cameron family wills. Subcollection 3367(B) contains family letters of the Amis, Butterworth, and Blanchard families. Included are letters from Sarah Davis Amis while she was living on a plantation near Columbus, Miss., in the 1830s and 1840s, to her grandmother in Warrenton, N.C.; letters to and from the four Amis sisters after their mother’s death in 1852, while they travelled in Europe and lived with their Butterworth relatives in New York and Morristown, N.J.; letters among the Amises and Butterworths after the latter moved, in 1864, to California, where Samuel Butterworth was managing a mine at Almaden; letters from Thomas Amis, who went to live with relatives in Madison Parish, La., in 1870; and correspondence to and from the Blanchards after their marriage when they travelled to Japan, 1906.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: This collection contains family letters written from a plantation near Columbus, Mississippi. The correspondence contains plantation letters from Sarah Amis that routinely mention the welfare of two slaves named Lethe and Sophia, including an 1840 note stating that Lethe gave birth to a child who was “right good looking and not black of course”; a letter from Sophia to Bettie and Sallie Amis (1858); a North Carolina letter referring to “old negroes” at the end of the Civil War (1867); a comment from Sallie Amis in Petersburg, Virginia that “the niggas are as impudent as they can be” (1867); a report from Mamie Amis in San Francisco of Irish prejudice against free blacks (1869); and discussion of the political actions of blacks in Louisiana (1870-1876).