Louise Phelps Kellogg was born in Milwaukee in 1862, the daughter of Amherst Willoughby and Isabelle Phelps Kellogg. She attended Milwaukee Downer College for a time, and in 1894 came to the University of Wisconsin to continue her academic work. After earning her bachelor's degree in 1897, she remained at the University for graduate study in history under Frederick Jackson Turner. She spent a year abroad, studying at the University of Paris and the London School of History and Economics, and returned to Madison to conclude her work for her doctorate in 1901. Three years later her thesis, “The American Colonial Charter,” won the Justin Winsor prize in history.
At that time the State Historical Society of Wisconsin was expanding rapidly under the energetic direction of its new superintendent, Reuben Gold Thwaites. The very year that Miss Kellogg was granted her Ph.D. degree, the Society had moved from its cramped and gloomy quarters in the State Capitol building to a magnificent structure on the lower campus, which it was to share with the university library.
Among the many lines of development planned by the new director, who had been a journalist, was the editing and publishing of some of the rich stores of historical records accumulated by his predecessor, Lyman C. Draper. Miss Kellogg's New England background, her Wisconsin heritage, her historical training, together with her knowledge of French and her high standards of workmanship, made her the ideal person to assist Mr. Thwaites in carrying out these aims. In the fall of 1901 she began her work for the Historical Society as his research assistant, and remained with the institution until her death in 1942.
The first task undertaken by the two was the editing of a part of the collection of manuscripts that Dr. Draper had spent a lifetime in collecting, and which he had bequeathed to the Society. Miss Kellogg transcribed documents, identified persons and events mentioned in them, clarified obscure passages, corresponded with other historical institutions to find documents that would fill the gaps in the Draper collections, and did much of the editorial work connected with seeing the volumes through the press. Three volumes were thus produced under the editorship of Thwaites and Kellogg: Documentary History of Dunmore's War (1905); Revolution on the Upper Ohio (1908); and Frontier Defense on the Upper Ohio (1912). After Thwaites's death in 1913, Miss Kellogg continued the series with two volumes edited under her own name: Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio (1916); and Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio (1917).
Simultaneously with the issuing of selections from the Draper Manuscripts, Thwaites was directing the publication of rare source materials on early Wisconsin history. One of the first acts of his administration had been to secure from the Green Bay area a mass of original papers dealing with the fur trade among the early French inhabitants. Some of these he had had deciphered and translated and from them he built up a coherent story of white penetration into the Great Lakes area. The study of the French in Wisconsin led inevitably to a search for information on the French in the entire continent: their explorations, missionary efforts, Indian policy, trade, and conflicts with the British. In pursuit of documentary records on this enlarged sphere of interest, he or his assistants visited manuscript repositories in Canada and the United States, where they examined collections, made selections to be copied for the Wisconsin Historical Society, and annotated them for publication in the Collections. When Miss Kellogg joined the Society's staff, plans for volume 17 were in hand, and she assisted in all phases of the work in the preparation of that and the succeeding three volumes. Her notes taken on research expeditions and many of her notes for volumes 17-20 of the Collections, as well as for the five volumes of the Draper series, are filed alphabetically, as she had organized them, in Boxes 12-14 of this set of papers.
Miss Kellogg also rendered valuable editorial service in the preparation of other publications of the Society for whose content she was less directly responsible. She did much of the actual indexing and all of the final assembling and revising of the cumulative index to the twenty volumes of the Collections, issued in 1915, and for many years thereafter prepared the indexes to all the Society's publications. She furnished the biographical sketches for the Constitutional Series edited by Thwaites's successor, Dr. Milo M. Quaife, and read the manuscripts and proofs of the Doomsday Series written by Dr. Joseph Schafer, who became the Society's superintendent in 1920. Beginning with the first issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History, in 1917, she contributed dozens of articles and book reviews, wrote introductions and notes to documents, supplied answers to queries in the “Question Box,” and, above all, assembled and wrote out for each issue of the quarterly the miscellany of items set forth under the heading “Society and State.”
Up to 1917 her production had been under the auspices of the Wisconsin Historical Society, but that year she edited the Early Narratives of the Northwest, a volume in a series of collections of original documents issued under the general editorship of J. Franklin Jameson for the American Historical Association. In 1923 she was invited to edit for a Caxton Club edition of Charlevoix's Journal of a Voyage to North America. Miss Kellogg's years of study of the French in North America prepared her for her next step, the writing of the French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (1925), her most successful production. Ten years later it was followed by the British Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest. The two last-mentioned books were published by the Society; the original manuscripts and notes for both volumes are preserved in Boxes 16-18 of these papers. An attempt to find a commercial publisher for another volume, a “popular” history of the state, which she wrote in the closing years of her life, met with failure; two copies of the completed manuscript are on file in Box 20. In 1932 she wrote an introduction and notes for a new edition of Waubun, to publicize the restoration of the Indian Agency house at Fort Winnebago, once occupied by the Kinzie family.
When Scribner's laid the plans in the late 1920's for their elaborate Dictionary of American Biography, they invited Miss Kellogg to prepare a selected list of the sketches. When the final volume was issued, in 1936, she had contributed over 60 sketches. The manuscripts of these sketches, as well as correspondence with the editors and receipts for payment for her work, are filed in Box 22. Similar records for her work on the Dictionary of American History and the Atlas of American History are filed in the same box.
Recognition of her contributions to scholarship were slow in coming, but they came in abundance in the last fifteen years of her life. The University of Wisconsin conferred an honorary Litt. D. in 1926; Marquette University in Milwaukee, an honorary L.H.D. in 1937. The Wisconsin Archaeological Society bestowed the Lapham Medal for excellence in anthropological research in 1935; the Royal Society of London invited her to its fellowship at about the same time. She was one of the founders of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, served as committee member and contributor, and finally as president of the association in 1930-31, the only woman ever to hold that office. At the time of her death, the American Historical Association, in which she held a membership for forty years, rated her as “for a generation... the best-known woman historian in the West.”
One result of the wide publication program of the Society was the recognition among scholars of the usefulness of the Wisconsin Historical Society as a research center, and requests for assistance began to come in from all over the country. To these were added appeals from Wisconsin residents, who were becoming increasingly interested in their state and local history. These mail queries were routed to Miss Kellogg's desk, and the fixing of her title in 1920 as Senior Research Associate indicates the prominence of this type of service among her duties. In this capacity she answered questions propounded by local historians, historical societies, women's clubs, libraries, genealogists, church organizations, state departments, investigators in the Draper Manuscripts, research workers, historical writers, and so on in an ever growing clientele. The subjects dealt with in this research correspondence are summarized in the annual reports of the Society; Miss Kellogg herself kept a card index of the names of inquirers and subjects dealt with from 1913 to 1941, and from these a subject index to this part of her correspondence has been prepared to serve as a finding aid to the information assembled in these letters.
Some of her research investigations resulted in fairly comprehensive reports. An outstanding example is the report and bibliography of maps and accounts touching upon the northeastern boundary of Wisconsin, prepared for the Wisconsin Michigan boundary dispute court case in 1923. Another is the sheaf of memoranda secured from Draper's manuscripts and correspondence, to substantiate the Society's claim to ownership of his manuscript collection when the claim was contested by the State of Tennessee in 1921. Other less extensive but equally valuable summaries of information deal with such subjects as place names, sketches of institutions, biographical sketches, etc. These, too, have been indexed by subject in a card index file.
Not only did people write to Miss Kellogg for information on historical problems, but they also wrote or came in person for advice and suggestions on proposed publications, on interpretation of data, on subjects for theses, as well as for criticism of their finished products. She furnished many outlines, in this capacity of consultant, for programs for women's clubs in the state, together with bibliographies of material available and recommendations for speakers. Perhaps the most pretentious piece of work of this sort was her study of historical markers in the state, started as an aid to the Land-marks Committee of the women's clubs, and taking form in a survey published in the Proceedings for 1927. A request by the State Highway Department in 1923 for proposals for subjects, phrasing, and location of markers throughout the state was the occasion for a reexamination of the subject and a thorough study of Wisconsin historic spots. The notes Miss Kellogg made at that time are filed in a box in this set of papers, entitled “Highway Markers and Landmarks” (Box 21).
A growing recognition of another of Miss Kellogg's talents--her ability to interest and instruct large audiences--is shown in demands for her services as a public speaker. A card file which she kept of her speaking engagements (Box 11) shows dates, place, and under whose auspices these gatherings were held. Her general correspondence contains many letters making arrangements for such affairs; some of the speeches are found in typewritten form or published reports among these papers; as are a collection of about twenty radio addresses, delivered between 1923 and 1934, mostly concerning Madison and Wisconsin history (Box 24).
Although the nature of her work kept her closely confined to the library, and although she had been afflicted with almost total deafness from childhood, Miss Kellogg was by no means a recluse. She kept relatives, childhood friends, classmates, and church associates closely around her. Among the members of the historical profession she had a large and devoted circle of admirers. Her enthusiastic and generous responses to inquiries from total strangers often expanded into an animated correspondence and warm friendships. In addition to her membership in historical associations, she belonged to the Madison Literary Society, the P.E.O., the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Association of University Women, the Woman Suffrage Association, the League of Women Voters, the Woman's Committee of the Dane County Council of Defense in World War I, and the National Conference of Jews and Christians, and took an active part in the meetings of these organizations. All the personal and professional correspondence which she preserved (exclusive of correspondence of a purely research nature) is filed in her general correspondence. A separate box contains her notes and correspondence on her own career and on the Kellogg genealogy. Boxes 9 and 10 contain diaries she kept from 1911 to 1942, with the exception of the record for 1940, which could not be found either at her cousin's home or in her office.
The Kellogg papers were collected from her desk, from filing boxes of notes and correspondence she had kept for her own convenience, and the home of her cousin, Mrs. Carl Russell Fish. Boxes 40-43 were transferred from the State Archives, October 1970.
