This collection is comprised of chronologically arranged correspondence, speeches, lectures, and sermons; and notebooks containing diaries and other notes.
Routine army life, chiefly as an officer in the 49th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, is described in letters from Fallows to his wife, Lucy. Other letters in this period come from his brother-in-law, William E. Huntington, while attending the University of Wisconsin and Boston University in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies and later while president of the latter university.
Other correspondence concerns Fallows' activities while State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Wisconsin, 1870-1873; president of Illinois Wesleyan University at Bloomington, 1874-1875; editor in 1877 of The Appeal, a religious publication; president and presiding bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church during most of the period beginning with the early years of that church in 1877 and extending to Fellows' death; president of the Board of Managers of the Illinois State Reformatory at Pontiac, 1891-1913; member and officer of the University of Wisconsin Club of Chicago; state and national officer of the Grand Army of the Republic, 1907-1909 and 1914-1915; commissioner sent to inspect the Philippine Islands, 1913-1914; president of the Illinois Commission to Commemorate the Half-Century Anniversary of Negro Freedom, 1913-1915; president of the Army of the Tennessee, 1915-1922; chairman of the Grant Memorial Commission at Washington, 1921-1922; and member and officer of numerous other patriotic, religious, and reform organizations.
There are letters from Grenville M. Dodge, Augustus L. Chetlain, James Tanner, Mrs. John A. Logan, and others concerning the activities of Civil War veteran organizations; John McElroy while editor of the National Tribune at Washington; Harold L. Ickes, Franklin McVeagh, William Hale Thompson, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and others concerning Chicago charities and World War I work; his relative, Bishop Frederick Dan Huntington of the Protestant Episcopal Church; various members of the Ulysses S. Grant family; Bishop Charles E. Cheney and other less prominent members of the Reformed Episcopal Church; Frances E. Willard during the latter 'eighties and 1895; his personal friends, Elizabeth A. Reed, famed Orientalist, and her daughter, Myrtle Reed, popular novelist; Flinders Petrie while secretary of the Victoria Institute in London; Henry Wade Rogers while president of Northwestern University; and from numerous other statesmen, newspapermen, women suffragists, and reformers of wide range.
Other letters deal with the fire at Hinckley, Minnesota; selling “Bishop's Beer” at a temperance saloon in 1895; New York politics, in which his son Edward was interested; divorce and divorce laws; trade unionism; the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago; the management of the periodical The World Today, 1904-1910; his advocacy of divine healing and the use of sour milk to promote longevity; simplified spelling; the management of a farm at Itabo, Cuba; speaking engagements throughout the nation; and his prominence in World War I patriotic activities, owing especially to his having been breveted a brigadier general in 1865.
Two boxes contain Fallows' lectures on health and pychology, some sermons, and many notes for speeches and sermons. There are also notes on observations made while in the Philippines in 1913.
One box contains thirty small volumes of notebooks including a list of members and miscellaneous information concerning the Summerfield Methodist Episcopal of Milwaukee kept during Fellows' pastorate, 1858-1865; a list of contributors of money to the People's Institute of Chicago in 1872; and numerous, sketchy diaries, 1864-1906, chiefly listing engagements, accounts, and miscellaneous information.
