Research

Scope and Content Note

This series consists mainly of incoming correspondence but also includes printed and unpublished reports, minutes of Land Office commissioners, depositions, memoranda, lists of expenditures and appropriations, petitions, and claims.

These may have been the working papers of Senator Thomas Hillhouse, who in 1862 became the State's Adjutant General and served until 1863. This could explain the presence of records pertaining to purely legislative questions among the files turned over the State Library by the Adjutant General's Office in 1911.

These papers relate mainly to financial matters such as claims requiring settlement or appropriations to be made by the legislature. A number of items appear to be requests submitted by different agencies specifying their needs so they could be incorporated into a general appropriations bill. The series contains not only incoming correspondence to Hillhouse (who was also a member of the Senate Finance Committee in 1861) but to other legislators such as Friend N. Burt, Lucius Robinson, F.A. Conkling, and William H. Ferry.