Creator: Jones and Patterson family.
Collection number: 578
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Abstract: Patterson family members were merchants, manufacturers, and public officials. Family members included General Edmund Jones (1771-1844) of Wilkes and Caldwell counties, N.C.; Samuel Finley Patterson (1799-1874) of Salem, N.C., banker, merchant, railroad president, state official, and son-in-law of Jones; Rufus Lenoir Patterson (1830-1879), merchant manufacturer, state official, and son of S.F. Patterson. Samuel Legerwood Patterson (1850-1918), another son of S.F. Patterson, farmer and North Carolina commissioner of agriculture; and Lindsay Patterson (b. 1858), lawyer and son of R.L. Patterson, and of his wife Lucy (Patterson) Patterson, clubwoman, writer, lecturer, and Republican National Committeewoman for North Carolina. Personal, business, and political papers, chiefly 1800-1880, of the Patterson, Jones, and related families. Volumes include account books from 1796 of merchandising, lumbering, and lands of General Edmund Jones; mercantile account books and a variety of other business records, 1830-1870, of Samuel Finley Patterson; account books, before and after the Civil War, of Rufus Lenoir Patterson, including records of a textile mill in Salem, 1855-1866, of merchandising and personal business, and of dealings with slaves, and with African American laborers and servants after the Civil War. Personal account books; a diary, 1887-1894; a notebook of political speeches, 1890, of Samuel Legerwood Patterson; and other family records including a law student’s diary at Yale, 1840. Correspondence, chiefly 1833-1880, concerns a wide variety of family and business matters of the Pattersons and of other prominent persons to whom they were related, and their political activity throughout the nineteenth century, including many state and local offices they held. There are a few papers of Lindsay Patterson and of his wife Lucy (Patterson) Patterson.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Personal, business, and political papers of four generations of the Jones and Patterson families, merchants, manufacturers, and public officials of North Carolina. The collection includes slave bills of sale in 1808 and 1822-1823 (Folder 113, 119, 120); a ledger documenting accounts with slaves in 1817 and 1818 (Folders 277 ); two books recording the allowances of slaves and servants between 1858-1859 and 1860-1866 (Folders 250 and 251); and accounts of Rufus Lenoir Patterson’s textile mill in Salem, North Carolina, which contain records of post-Civil War black labor. (See also Folder 256).