Wilson and Hairston Family Papers

White members of the Wilson and Hairston families owned plantations, enslaved people, and were merchants of Henry and Pittsylvania counties, Va., and Davie, Rockingham, and Stokes counties, N.C. Enslaved people supplied labor at many of the family's plantations, possibly including Sauratown Hill and Muddy Creek in Stokes County, N.C.; Royal Oak, Oak Hill, Berry Hill near Danville, and Brierfield, all in Pittsylvania County, Va.; Bostick Lower Place, Upper Place, Muddy Creek, Terrell's Place, Bradley's Place, Town Place, all in Stokes County, N.C., or Pittsylvania County, Va.; Goose Pond in Rockingham County, N.C., and Pittsylvania County, Va.; Cooleemee Hill in Davie County, N.C.; and Smith's Place and Leatherwood Plantation in Henry County, Va. There were also family properties in Mississippi. The papers include business correspondence, financial and legal papers and scattered personal correspondence documenting six generations of the white Wilson and Hairston families. The people enslaved by these families are documented in the lists of names, in bills of sale, and papers relating to manumission in 1832 through the American Colonization Society. Among the activities represented are plantation management, including purchase of supplies; the sale of tobacco through Virginia commission merchants; the service of Peter Hairston (1752-1832) as a deputy sheriff in Henry County, Va., mainly 1751-1788; and activities of the Sandy Creek, Mayo, County Line, and Staunton River Baptist associations, 1833-1868. Civil War materials are few and consist of scattered family letters and some receipts for foodstuffs sold to the Confederate Army. Approximately one-fourth of the collection consists of the personal and professional correspondence of Alfred Varley Sims as a professor at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), 1895-1904, and as a civil engineer, and includes materials related to his time in Cuba, 1905-1908, and to his connections with various southern and Cuban railroads and other businesses in Cuba and elsewhere.