The manuscripts present in the collection have been separated from the printed material and were opened for examination in June, 1944. They consisted of a great amount of family correspondence: letters that passed between Davidson, his half-sister, Orpha E. Leavitt, and his mother; also letters to all three of them from cousins, uncles, and aunts over a period of seventy-five years or more. There were also letters from Davidson's classmates and parishioners and Miss Leavitt's college friends and former pupils, as well as fundraising appeals, Christmas cards, wedding and birth announcements, clippings from local newspapers, bulletins of church services, poems, temperance literature, bills, mail-order advertisements, commencement programs, prospectuses of books, unidentified snapshots, and miscellany. Much of this material was discarded because it had no permanent value; only enough of the ephemera was saved to represent the nature of the original collection. Many of the family letters, too, that contained routine observations and messages were discarded.
The earliest letters in the correspondence are those of Davidson's father, George Bennett Davidson of Galena and Mendota, Illinois. Letters received by him include several from his father near Keith, Scotland; some from Tarver and Risk, publishers of the St. Louis Western Journal for which Davidson was an agent and contributor; and others from various relatives and friends, including Israel Sanderson, a newspaper publisher in the lead mining region. There are also typewritten copies of two letters written by the elder Davidson to his wife from near Fort Laramie in 1850, and while he was on his way to California, shortly before his death from cholera.
Family letters addressed to Mrs. George B. Davidson, who married James Leavitt and soon became a widow for the second time, are found throughout the collection from 1850 until her death at her son's home in 1913. Among the early items are a number of letters from her brother, John Nelson, who had accompanied her husband on his westward trip, about fifty from her brothers William and Joseph Nelson written during the Civil War, and many letters from other relatives from both the Nelson and Davidson sides of the family residing at Copper Falls and Bay, Michigan and in southwestern Wisconsin. For many years Mrs. Leavitt made her home at Jamestown, in Grant County. When her son became a student at Doane College she followed him there, and she served as matron at the college for sixteen years.
In 1865 John Nelson Davidson went to Viroqua as an apprentice in the newspaper office of his uncle William Nelson. At that time the young man's letters to his mother and half-sister, Orpha first appear. This series of his letters continues throughout the collection, running through his student and teaching days and his various pastorates. Orpha E. Leavitt taught at Downer College before its removal from Fox Lake to Milwaukee, and also at the River Falls State Teachers College and at Rockford College in Illinois. She died at her brother's home in Madison in 1938. There are many letters written by Miss Leavitt to her mother and brother, as well as letters she received from them and from other relatives and friends.
While the Davidson papers are fundamentally a collection of family correspondence, they rise above the status of a mere exchange of personal gossip. The existence of a group of letters covering an entire century is in itself remarkable. Both of Davidson's parents were of Scottish birth and were probably better educated than the average Wisconsin frontier settler. All of the family expressed themselves well on paper; the father and son had a certain poetic tendency that frequently is exhibited in their letters. By reason of its very frequency and prolixity, however, the correspondence is less valuable that the occasional painstaking writing of the pioneer who, in a single sitting, often surveyed the events and impressions of an entire season. The letters touch on many aspects of pioneer life: privations, births, deaths, housekeeping problems, children's care, and conditions of earning a livelihood in the various places where the Davidsons and Nelsons lived. They deal more extensively with problems of country newspapermen, college students and teachers, and small town preachers, and are valuable for a study of the particular schools and colleges with which the brother and sister were connected.
Information on church history is largely confined to the establishment of early Congregational churches in Wisconsin but there is some data on other denominations. The material consists largely of notations made by Davidson from printed church minutes. This information has been filed in alphabetical order by place name. This material has been microfilmed (Micro 2092). Further information on this subject is found in the general correspondence; in letters or copies of letters received by Davidson from church pastors between 1890 and 1895 when he was preparing his volume, In Unnamed Wisconsin; in copies of correspondence secured from other sources, such as the Wheeler Papers at Beloit College; and in the exchange of correspondence with his fellow pastors.
Filed with the Davidson Papers are record books of two organizations with which he was connected (the Prohibition State Central Committee for Wisconsin, and the Fond du Lac Ministers' Association) and a letterbook, 1886-1888, kept by the Reverend George A. Hood, secretary of the American Home Missionary Society at Ashland. The oversize folder is a graphic history of the Congregational Church in Wisconsin.
