Business papers relating to lumbering operations in the Chippewa valley and the sale of the manufactured lumber through subsidiary wholesale companies bearing various names and located at St. Louis and Hannibal, Missouri; Fort Scott, Kansas; Dubuque, Iowa; Winona, Wabasha, and Minneiska, Minnesota, and other cities, chiefly along the Mississippi River. The papers date from the time of Ingram's association with A. M. Dole of Ottawa, Canada, and Donald Kennedy in the firm of Dole, Ingram & Kennedy, which began lumbering at Eau Claire in 1857. Dole retired from the firm in 1862, and from that time until 1881 when the company was reorganized as the Empire Lumber Company, it was known as Ingram, Kennedy & Company.
The correspondence, 1857-1904, emphasizes the selling end of the business and consists very largely of letters of report from branch managers, agents, and salesmen, and correspondence between members of the company. The correspondence as a whole pertains to business plans, policies, and practices; filling of orders for lumber and millwork; market prospects; prices, types, and qualities of lumber; credit and collection matters; complaints, rafting of the lumber on the Chippewa and Mississippi rivers; personnel and employes; claims for compensation for injuries sustained by employees; earnings of the company, acquisition of timber lands in Wisconsin and several other states; organization of the Pacific Empire Lumber Company at South Bend, Washington in the 1890's; and investments in anthracite coal mines in Alberta, Canada. Among names of letter writers most prominent at various times are those of E. H. Playter, D. M. Dulaney, W. H. Day, and C. A. Chamberlin.
Also in the correspondence are various scattered financial and statistical records, such as balance sheets, trial balances, profit and loss statements, income tax reports for 1895, tax receipts, statements of logs scaled, inventories, distribution statements, summaries of lumber sales, stump age contracts, and log driving contracts.
A group of letters, 1893-1901, relates to Ripon College--finances, endowment, and particularly the building of Ingram Hall and circumstances surrounding the resignation of the president of the college. Among these letters are a number from President Rufus C. Flagg, Edward H. Merrell, and S. M. Pedrick.
Miscellaneous letters have to do with the effect of severance of economic relations with the South in 1861; the Dells of the Chippewa improvement; internal improvements by the federal government on the Chippewa River in regard to which there are several letters of Philetus Sawyer and M. C. Griffin; philanthropic work of Ingram, including assistance to the work of the Rev. D. L. Moody, several of whose letters are here; labor troubles in the lumber industry; sale of Cornell University lands in Wisconsin; the building and operation of the Eau Claire Water Works; the depression of 1893; and relief of the cyclone victims at New Richmond, Wisconsin in 1899.
The letter books, 1873-1904, several of which are illegible, contain copies of letters of Ingram and C. A. Chamberlin, long assistant secretary of the Empire Lumber Company. The subjects of the letters here are about the same as those of the unbound correspondence.
Other bound material includes scattered financial records relating to the Ingram lumbering operations--a journal, two ledgers, and other records; and a journal, ledger, and time book of the Half Moon Lake Canal Company.
