The Theron W. Haight Papers consist almost wholly of his family letters and his personal diaries. There are, in addition, some miscellaneous inclusions--an 1832 Myrick family will (his maternal grandfather's); biographical records; genealogical forms--and speeches and unpublished manuscripts by Theron W. Haight and by his son, Putney Haight.
Correspondence in the Theron W. Haight Papers spans from 1849 to 1908, with an additional Putney Haight letter dated 1949. Theron W. Haight's diaries cover 1866, are complete from 1877 to 1881, from 1883 to 1885, from 1892 to 1899, 1901, and from 1908 to 1913, the year of his death.
Nearly all of the letters are handwritten. In number, they exceed 300 individual letters; roughly one half were written by Theron W. Haight himself.
The best, and most complete, sequence of letters was written by Haight to his parents in Lorraine, Jefferson County, New York, while he served with the Twenty-fourth New York Infantry Volunteers during the Civil War. From May, 1861, to his discharge in the spring of 1863, Haight wrote regularly and in much detail of his battle experiences and his day-by-day life as a soldier. They are well-phrased and clear accounts of many major battles; they are of more than routine interest to the Wisconsin story of the Civil War, since in the course of his service with the Twenty-fourth New York, Haight's regiment belonged to General Rufus King's division of McDowell's Army.
Haight was a classical scholar and his avid interest in reading is apparent in the correspondence included in his Papers that he exchanged with school and service friends throughout the wartime period.
Elsewhere in the correspondence in the Theron W. Haight Papers are letters from Morris P. Haight from Summit, Wis., to his family in New York, written between 1849 and 1861; letters from Theron to Morris pertinent to his settling in Wisconsin; correspondence between Rev. William Paret and Theron spanning many years; letters to Theron from a wide range of acquaintances and relatives in New York and in the West; and letters from Theron to a student, “Annie,” who in 1870 became his wife.
Actual business correspondence is extremely limited. Theron Haight's letters home discuss his changing situations in teaching jobs, law study, and newspaper work. There are a few letters concerned with the Waukesha Freeman; bits of correspondence between Haight and newspapers for which he served as correspondent (including two letters from S. Cadwallader, dated November, 1871, when Cadwallader was secretary of the Milwaukee News Company); letters written to his family in Waukesha from Madison while he was secretary of the Wisconsin State Board of Charities; a letter from Congressman Charles G. Williams seeking Haight's advice on the Mukwonago postmastership; and random statements from Waukesha and Milwaukee firms.
The Haight diaries vary widely in amount of detail and pertinent information. For some years (e.g. 1880, 1892, 1897) there are only random entries and many of these are simply one-line notations of destination for the day or serve as a calendar of his cases in court. His diaries for 1877 and 1878, while he was secretary of the Wisconsin Board of Charities, describe his day-by-day work and include partial schedules of his visits to state institutions; there are also memoranda on board meetings and the condition of some Wisconsin prisons. The diaries would most certainly be helpful to anyone reconstructing a detailed chronology, for they outline Haight's changes of occupation and interests. When closely read, they probably would be meaningful to a student of Wisconsin law, since there are many brief notations on individual cases. His diary of 1879 mentions an overnight visit of “Thwaites of the State Journal,” and in 1910, there are several entries concerned with his transactions with Reuben Gold Thwaites (then secretary of the State Historical Society) over Haight's manuscript on the Cushings.
There are obvious gaps in the Theron W. Haight Papers. He was foremost a lawyer and there is very little in the correspondence or diaries that actually describes this major occupation of his lifetime. He was a successful newsman and there is very little in the Papers which could be used in a study of Wisconsin journalism.
On the other hand, there is much in the Theron W. Haight Papers which describes the man himself, his philosophy, his attitude toward Wisconsin, his family, his community. If other papers more directly concerned with his writing or his legal practice come to light, it would seem that here is a body of material from which to build a biography of an extremely capable and intelligent Wisconsin citizen. “Human interest” is here: a young man's decision between ministry, teaching, newspapering, the law; an intellectual easterner in post-Civil War Wisconsin; and the sheer romance of a man's writing first to a student in school-teacher manner with pages full of corrections for her letters to him--then gradually these letters becoming less pedagogical and in time, the teacher marrying his student.
