The primary business activities of the Union Mortgage Loan Company, the making of loans and the executing and subsequent selling of mortgages, are documented in this series. It contains three sets of volumes, entitled closed Wisconsin loans, closed western loans, and second mortgage record respectively; some miscellaneous inventories or lists of various types of loans; and an extensive set of files on individual mortgages. The closed loans volumes provide a summary of transactions made on individual loans extended by the company. They show the dates of the loans, the instrument (usually a first mortgage), the name of the person to whom the mortgage was sold, record of payments, county where the property is located and legal description, and valuation of the property. The second mortgage record contains names of the parties involved, description of property, amount, record of payments, and amount of the first mortgage on the property.

The company maintained a separate file or packet for each mortgage it executed. The packet label includes the following information: name of loan recipient; loan number (assigned by the company); amount; interest rate; date of loan and date due; acreage, county location, and valuation of security for the loan; and name of person to whom the mortgage was assigned or sold. The files themselves generally contain a loan application, an appraiser's report on the property, loan extension documents, a satisfaction of mortgage document, tax receipts, and correspondence between the company and the loan recipient. These documents contain a wealth of information which lends itself to aggregation and statistical study. The loan applications, for example, are on standardized forms and give data on the applicant including age, marital status, nationality, and number of children at home. The forms also generally show the purpose for which the loan was wanted; the date and price for which the applicant originally purchased the farm; existing incumbrances; the number and types of livestock owned by the applicant; the buildings on the farm and their size and valuation; and type of soil, number of acres free of stumps, crops produced in the previous year, and principal farm implements owned. The correspondence, on the other hand, provides a more subjective picture of farm conditions and particularly of the crop failures, economic problems, and foreclosures of the 1930's.

The mortgages are organized in two groups: those made before the 1934 reorganization and those made after it. The post-reorganization files are relatively few in number and primarily cover loans made within the city of Eau Claire. They are in numerical order, which closely parallels a chronological arrangement. The pre-reorganization mortgages are subdivided into Wisconsin loans and Western (Montana and North Dakota) loans and are arranged numerically within each category. The method of assigning numbers in the early years was inconsistent, but later the numbers for Wisconsin and Western loans were assigned serially, and therefore approximately chronologically. To distinguish them from Wisconsin loans the number 1 was added to the front of the Western loan numbers. Thus sequentially Western loan number 11,186 was made after Wisconsin loan number 1185 and before 1187. Box 31, folder 10 contains a numerically arranged calendar of loans made. It shows the loan number, name of recipient, and county where the property is located.

A total of approximately 2170 mortgage packets were received with the collection. All but about 120 of these predate the 1934 reorganization of the Union Mortgage Loan Company. Of the pre-reorganization mortgages approximately 68 percent covered Wisconsin lands and the remaining 32 percent were on Western lands. Due to the volume of these files and their consistent and often routine contents, only a sample has been preserved. Packet labels, loan applications, and extension documents were saved for all mortgages. Within each category of mortgages (pre-reorganization Wisconsin, pre-reorganization Western, and post-reorganization) every tenth complete file was preserved.