The originals of the William Massie Papers collected here were acquired by Herbert A. Kellar, Director of the McCormick Historical Association in Chicago, during a research trip to Virginia in 1927 with Ulrich B. Phillips, historian of the American South. In Kellar's search for manuscripts relating to the McCormick family and nineteenth-century Virginiana to be added to the McCormick Collections, he was alerted to the Massies, who had been friends of Robert and Cyrus McCormick and who shared a business interest with them in the Tye River Turnpike Company. Of the Massie material he collected, Kellar retained the original only of an account book, 1823-1838, of the Tye River Company. It is now part at the McCormick Collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, The rest of the original Massie documents in his possession were sold by Kellar to the University of Texas. The photostatic copies returned to him from the university comprise this collection of William Massie Papers. The bulk of the Massie correspondence is held by the Virginia Historical Society, Duke University, and the University of Texas, and is indexed in The Massies of Virginia, a University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation by Oliver Refsell.
