The Noel A. Gillespie collection includes much correspondence, dating from 1899 to 1955. The bulk of letters are exchanges with his mother (Emily Rieder) but also present is correspondence with T. E. Lawrence (a friend of the family), Albert Schweitzer, Tubby Clayton, and other friends and relatives. There are also some business transactions documented.
The correspondence is arranged chronologically except for the letters from Dr. Albert Schweitzer and letters from Noel Gillespie when he was serving as Dr. Schweitzer's assistant and secretary in Africa in 1924. These folders are set apart, in Box 7, as “Albert Schweitzer material”. The letters from T. E. Lawrence are found with the general correspondence (Box 1) within the years 1913-1921.
The collection includes printed articles written by Gillespie on Ralph Milton Waters and Sir William Osier; and there is one article on the position of an American doctor in the war. There are newspapers and magazine clippings and thirty-five volumes of diaries and notebooks of N. A. Gillespie and Emily Rieder.
Added to the collection in 1972 are letters, 1970-1972, between William Haygood and several scholars and Schweitzer enthusiasts, mainly in Switzerland. Haygood was editor of the Wisconsin Magazine of History and was working on the publication there of the Schweitzer-Gillespie letters in this collection (in Volume 54, Spring 1971). The discussions center on Gillespie's life and character and on the location of other Gillespie and Schweitzer materials. Included are various publications relating to Schweitzer archives and societies in Europe and the United States. Three publications containing German translations of Gillespie's African letters and other materials on Schweitzer were added to the above materials in 1978.
