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Letters and papers of Olcott. Among the subjects covered are the history of the Bank; banks and politics in New York during the Jacksonian era; the operations of the safety Fund Banking System; land acquisition in the West, particularly Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and western New York; the Boston and Albany Railroad; the Corning Land Company; and the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. The papers are divided into the following groups: letters received, including correspondence with Martin Van Buren, Samuel P. Chase, William Henry Seward, William B. Astor, Silas Wright, William Kent, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Horatio Seymour; documents including land deeds, wills, leases, bonds, sureties, orders to pay, checks, bank ledgers, partnership agreements, earnings reports, tax assessments, and land sales; household bills and receipts; bank notes including excellent examples of early American currency; miscellaneous account books, photographs, and printed material; patents for Michigan and Ohio lands to William Thompson, Thomas W. Olcott, and Garrit Denniston signed by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren (proxy signatures).

This collection consists of the correspondence and administrative records of the University Extension's Home Study Division, which offered not-for-credit courses by mail. The records include communication with faculty members, students, and University administration (Buildings and Grounds, Office of the President, Office of the Secretary, Office of the Registrar, etc.). They document the Home Study division's outreach or promotional efforts (advertising, partnerships with other institutions), operational records (course fees, registrations, mailing services, office supplies), policy matters (academic credit, prison students, high school classes and the New York State Regents exams) and many requests for information from potential students, nationwide and from abroad. In addition to the short-lived Home Study program, there are records of other adult education experiments and initiatives at the University Extension such as courses by radio, extramural courses (held off-campus, across the East Coast), and Guidance Study (a replacement to Home Study). These are the administrative records held in the Office of the Director, mostly from the end of the Home Study experiment and organized alphabetically. The records do not include much about the origins of the Home Study at Columbia. They are more closely related to the evolution of the program and the continued interest in correspondence education after the program was discontinued. There is also an extensive collection of materials documenting other home study and adult education efforts around the country, from correspondence with individual programs to materials from national associations.