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The J. Neilson Barry collection is divided into four major groups:
Personal Papers The Research Files (Group III) are the heart of the collection and comprise its largest component. Although Barry studied many aspects of Pacific Northwest history, he focused most of his research on issues surrounding the early exploration and settlement of the region. He was particularly interested in the discovery and exploration of the Columbia River, competing claims of sovereignty, the trails of Lewis and Clark and other explorers, John Jacob Astor’s Astoria, the names of settlers who preceded the great migration on the Oregon Trail, and the establishment of civil government in Oregon. He scoured early explorers’ journals and memoirs for names of fur traders, missionaries, visitors, and emigrants to the region. He attempted to correlate the place names and geographical features on early maps with modern nomenclature. J. Neilson Barry was interested in detail: the precise location of missions, forts, and posts; the exact routes of explorers’ travels. That John Reed’s 1813 fur-trading camp was near the confluence of the Boise and Snake Rivers was not enough for him; nor was the statement that Lewis and Clark traversed Idaho via the Lolo Trail. He sought out precise locations and precise routes, as close to their actual footprints and footsteps as he could determine. In pursuit of these facts, Barry corresponded widely. The collection contains more than 5,000 letters with several hundred correspondents. He might correspond with a high ranking State Department officer on an issue of treaty interpretation, or with a local postmaster, surveyor, or old-timer on the location of a spring or a meadow mentioned in a fur-trader’s journal. He collaborated with other historians, took detailed notes on primary and secondary sources, drew maps by hand, and compiled bibliographies of primary-source references to topics as diverse as the first sheep in the Oregon country to the kinds of weapons the Indians used. He organized his letters and notes by subject, binding them into booklets which served as file folders. Each booklet was labeled as to its content. The first processor of the collection, Annie Laurie Bird, pulled many of the folders together into subject groupings (Research Files 1 through 90); the rest were left in an alphabetical sequence as the Miscellaneous Subject File. Researchers on any topic, broad or narrow, will soon learn that letters and notes on the matters of their interest might be located in more than one part of the collection. Among the more prolific correspondents in the collection are Merrill D. Beal, Annie Laurie Bird, Frank Bond (U.S. Geographic Board), Charles H. Carey, R.C. Clark, Byron Defenbach, David C. Duniway, T.C. Elliott, W.J. Ghent, Grace Raymond Hebard, R.J. Hendricks, Merrill Jensen, C.S. Kingston, Elers Koch, Lewis A. McArthur, James McCormick, Edmond S. Meany, Robert W. Sawyer, Leslie M. Scott, and Frederic G. Young. Their letters are found in a number of files throughout the collection; they may be located (as can Barry's correspondence with several hundred other correspondents) by referring to the Index of Correspondents. In the course of his research, Barry, out of necessity, became a rather adept cartographer and collector of maps. He ordered photostats of explorers’ maps from libraries and archives in North America and abroad, long before they were widely available in historical atlases. He made multiple copies of many of them, some of which he kept for future reference; others he distributed to research libraries throughout the United States. He also collected published maps, particularly maps from the U.S. Forest Service. He annotated many of these, tracing the routes of explorers and traders as best he could. Because of their size, these annotated maps and photostats are filed away separately from the rest of the collection as Group IV, Maps. Published maps that were not annotated were separated from the collection and transferred to the Library’s map department. Smaller maps hand-drawn by Barry were left in the appropriate research files. Barry published the results of his research in historical journals and in newspapers. He stated in several letters that he had published over 300 articles. Many of his more important articles appeared on the pages of the Oregon Historical Quarterly and the Washington Historical Quarterly and other similar journals. The larger portion of his writings found their way to print, however, on the feature pages of newspapers such as the Sunday Oregonian. He also wrote two books, Redskin and Pioneer, a collection of historical tales for children, and an unpublished work on the trails of Idaho. Drafts and reprints of his major works are collected in Group II, Writings. Barry's personal papers (Group 1) contain material relating to his family, personal affairs, church work, World War I service, activities as a probation officer, and historical research and teaching. They include reminiscences from his childhood (Box 1); papers concerning the construction of his home, Barrycrest (Box 2); official case reports and record books as a Spokane probation officer (Boxes 2 and 41); memorabilia from his YMCA service in France during World War I (Box 2); his clergyman's register (1895-1921) (Box 39); gradebooks (1929-1930) from his teaching at Hill Military Academy (Box 3); personal account books for himself and his wife (Boxes 40 and 41); records of Trail Seekers, Inc. (Box 3); and histories and genealogies of the Barry, Pegram and related families (Box 1). During the early 1950s the Oregon State Archives borrowed several of Mr. Barry's research files from him and microfilmed them. The microfilm is now located at the Oregon State Library in Salem. There are also several smaller collections of J. Neilson Barry papers at other institutions, including the Idaho State Historical Society, University of Idaho, Oregon Historical Society, Eastern Washington State Historical Society, Washington State Historical Society, Washington State University, University of Washington, University of Montana, Montana State University, Missouri Historical Society, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Descriptions of most of these collections are published in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC). The J. Neilson Barry collection is available for research, by appointment, in the Special Collections Department of the Albertsons Library at Boise State University.
Collection number: MSS 1 For a history of the processing of the collection, see A Note on the Arrangement of the Collection Return to Special Collections homepage For questions or comments about this page, contact Special Collections Dept This page last changed: 25 July 2006
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