The majority of the letters were written by Gideon Winan Allen, who was known by his middle name of Winan. He was born in 1835, and came to Wisconsin from New London, Ohio. From 1858 to 1862 he attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but as a result of a disagreement with the dean of the faculty, Professor John W. Sterling (to which there are allusions in Allen's letters of May-June, 1863), Allen transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in the fall of 1862. There he received his law degree in 1864. Late that year he arranged to begin his law practice and to serve as district attorney in Sturgeon Bay. During the Civil War, Allen was a Democrat, and many of his letters discuss men in public life, politics, military events, Negroes, the draft, and other war-related topics from the Copperhead point of view. Among the letters are a few (1863-1866) written to him by his friend Marcus P. Wheeler, brother of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
In the spring of 1872, Allen went South to investigate business possibilities in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. The letters he wrote home during this journey are descriptive of the rural and urban areas he visited, and give his appraisal of conditions in the South after the Civil War, conditions which he decided would not be favorable for a Northern lawyer.
Annie M. Cox, whom Allen had known in Madison, was the other major writer and recipient of the letters. She was the daughter of Michael Poad (1806-1892) of Mineral Point, Wisconsin and his wife, Elizabeth Baker (1819-1898). The Poads were divorced sometime after the birth of their daughter Annie in 1840; and after Mrs. Poad married Charles Cox, Annie took the surname of her stepfather. After their marriage, Gideon Winan Allen and his wife made their permanent home in Sturgeon Bay. She died in 1895, he in 1912.
