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Letters and documents, the majority written between 1700 and 1900, dealing with both personal and corporate business and financial matters, assembled by Montgomery. The letters are chiefly by American and English writers. Many of the American letters are to and from various United States Treasury officials, usually the Secretary of the Treasury. Of the 107 letters by Joseph Anderson (1757-1835), U.S. Senator and jurist, the majority are written to Samuel Swartwout (1783-1856) when he was Comptroller of the United States and Collector of the Port of New York. Most of the documents are American with New York City firms predominating.

The collection contains various documents relating to the practice of enslavement in the Americas. It includes three documents related to the case of Joseph Pochin and John Milner who were accused of murder on the island of Jamaica, ca. 1681; a group of police reports for the city of New Orleans, August-November 1833, listing all arrests, mainly concerned with Afro-Americans sentenced to the chain gang; and other documents.

Avery's collection of Spanish children's drawings of the civil war consist of 153 drawings made by children aged 7 to 14 between the years 1936 and 1938. The drawings were willed to the Department of Art History and Archaeology of Columbia University by Martin Vogel, a lawyer, who died on May 20, 1938 at the age of 59. He made several bequests to Columbia University in a will dated March 16, 1938. From the date of this will and of his death, it is likely the drawings he purchased were those exhibited at Lord & Taylor's in February 1938. His name, however, does not appear among the patrons of the exhibition.