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Correspondence, mansucripts, transcripts, documents, photographs, and printed materials assembled by Vance for his dissertation, a biography of Myles Cooper (1737-1785), clergyman, Loyalist, and second president of King's College (now, Columbia University) from 1763 until 1775. There are transcripts of very many letters and manuscripts by and about Myles Cooper and King's College along with pertinent photographs and printed materials which Vance collected from American, English, and Scottish sources. There are also materials about Samuel Seabury (1729-1796) and Isaac Sears (1730-1786) whose biographical entries Vance wrote for the DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRPAHY. Among the correspondents are Gertrude Atherton, Nicholas Murray Butler, Marcus Benjamin, Dixon Ryan Fox, and Dumas Malone.

The collection contains documents about land holdings in and around Yonkers and Westchester and Dutchess Counties, New York owned by the wealthy Philipse, Gouverneur, Verplanck, Livingston, and other allied families. Included are grants, patents, deeds, indentures, transfers, wills, leases, accounts, maps, and records of civil and chancery court actions. These records not only chronicle legal actions, riots and uprisings of the European colonial settlers related to land disputes against these wealthy colonial settler families, but also record their interactions with the true landowners the Wappinger Confederacy.

Three volumes of correspondence, including some letterbook copies; many sermons, individually bound; prayers; and other manuscript materials. Correspondenbce is with many of his well known contemporaries and deals largely with matters pertaining to his church or to King's College. Shelved with the collection are two card file boxes containing an old handwritten calendar with abstracts, 1710-1914, a set of cross reference entries, and a calendar of material not at Columbia, 1715-1785. Additional letters have been added