The Prentice Papers are a small, disappointing collection that provide only fragmentary information about his survey work, his land and timber sales, or his family life. The collection is of benefit to genealogists because Prentice's daughters, Mrs. Jennie Conslick and Mrs. C. McMillan, were avid family historians, and the collection includes correspondence, notes, and charts they compiled about the Prentice and Van Dusen families. The collection is arranged alphabetically by subject.
The surveyor's maps and notebooks are unquestionably the most valuable material in the collection. In addition to a variety of notes, notebooks, diagrams, and maps, there is important material for portions of Adams, Juneau, Marathon and Portage Counties dating from the 1850s and 1860s. The manuscript maps from this period are arranged by township number and in addition to the usual survey markings and locations of rivers, Prentice has frequently noted the kind of timber present (such as pine, maple, hardwood, etc.), the location of property held by U.S. patent and state school lands, the location of homesteads and buildings, the name of the owners of the property, and the most desirable areas for future settlement and timber lands. The maps are supplemented by notebooks, primarily for Towns 33 and 34 N, in which Prentice often wrote his impressions of the land (hilly, swampy, rolling, meadows), kinds of timber and its condition, and his own rating of the soil (“unsuitable for cultivation,” “worthless,” “3rd rate”). Unfortunately the pencil notes are difficult to decipher. Volume 6 of the survey notebooks contains Prentice's notations of his survey of the state road from Stevens Point to Fremont as well as a list of expenses incurred in the work. Various other maps and notebooks relate primarily to his work as a Stevens Point city surveyor. They show the location and names of early business establishments, sidewalk and street levels, paving estimates, and platting of new additions.
Other business records are an 1872-1889 ledger of Prentice's mercantile establishment in Stevens Point and two employee time records books giving the name of employee, number of hours worked daily and in some cases, the daily wage as well as the weekly wage. J.L. Prentice is listed in these volumes as an employee. However, the researcher is cautioned that either one or both may be part of the B. F. McMillan Lumber Company Records because a third notebook , 1916-1922, originally with the Prentice Papers, was clearly linked to the McMillan Co. journals.
The correspondence in the Prentice papers is fragmentary. The bulk of the correspondence is from Prentice's business associates, and it concerns land and timber sales. Included among this is a postcard, 1884, June 25, from Moses M. Strong, regarding the sale of property. In addition, the correspondence also includes copies of resolutions of the Stevens Point Common Council concerning sidewalk and street surveys. For the period 1883-1886 Prentice held an office in the local G.A.R. post, and the correspondence includes his applications for a veteran's pension, as well as several applications for fellow veterans. After 1895 the correspondence deals almost exclusively with land and timber sales in north central Wisconsin. The scantiness of the correspondence is particularly disappointing with regard to Prentice's land and timber business for the separately filed land records suggests that his acquisition practices would be a fruitful subject for study. The chief advantage the collection offers beyond information available in grantor/grantee indexes is the inclusion of a large number of tax certificates. These documents indicate his intention to purchase land that may have been reclaimed by the original owners. Such transactions are documented in county property records. The deeds, taxes, and other property records in the collection are of value primarily in establishing the geographic scope of his property.
