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A collection of 400 letters, cards, petitions, telegrams, printed, and other similar items received and sent by U.S. Senator and Representatives Howard Sutherland (1865-1950) of West Virginia. The papers are part of Sutherland's constituent mail and are all concerned with the question of women's suffrage. The period covered is 1914-1919, and correspondence regarding both the Bristow-Mondell House Resolution, considered in Jan. 1915, and the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, voted upon 5 June 1919, is included. About one-third of the collection is anti-suffrage in sentiment; the other two-thirds is made up of material from suffrage supporters. The collection is arranged chronologically, with carbon copy replies from Sutherland attached to the letters to which they reply. Among supporters of women's suffrage may be found the National American Women Suffrage Association, the National Woman's Party, the West Virginia Equal Suffrage League, the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage, various West Virginia chapters of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, individual professional women and housewives, the West Virginia chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Victory Union, the Women's Home Missionary Society of Wheeling, West Virginia, the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission, Inc., various labor groups, including the West Virginia Federation of Labor, numerous professional and business men, the Woman's Republican Club of New York City, and various other non-West Virginia state women's suffrage organizations. Anti-suffrage correspondents include the American Constitutional League, numerous individual professional and business men, housewives, and various state and local associations opposed to women's suffrage. Especially important among the pro-suffrage correspondence are letters signed by Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna Howard Shaw, and Maud Wood Park of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. These letters are dated 25 Sept. 1918, and 17 Feb. and 13 June 1919. Further description of the collection, including excerpts from some letters, may be found in the inventory folder for the Howard Sutherland Papers.

Personal and business papers of the Lewis family, mainly of John D. (1800-1882), Charles C., Sr. (b.1839), and Charles C., Jr. (b.1865), of Kanawha County. For the period 1825-1875 there are papers of various members of the Ruffner, Dickinson, and Wilson families of West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, and other states. The business papers relate to farming operations, the purchase and sale of slaves, salt manufacturing and trade, the Old Sweet Springs Company, coal, iron, oil, lumbering, railroads, and real estate in Kanawha, Clay, Boone, Fayette, and Nicholas counties. There are newspaper clippings, speeches, and other papers reflecting the Lewis' interests in the Democratic Party in the period 1914-1920. Settlement papers and correspondence regarding the estates of John D. Lewis, and Joel, Daniel, and Andrew Ruffner are in the collection. The personal papers include diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, and letters. Travel accounts in the United States, South America, and Europe are given in the correspondence, as well as comments on schools in West Virginia and Virginia; the building of a church in Kanawha County in 1834; missionary work in Colombia, South America, 1874-1875; Civil War and postwar conditions in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri; conditions at Camp Chase, in the Civil War; and material relating to World War I.

The collection consists of correspondence, business and legal papers, family photographs, clippings, and account books of Zebulon and Eli Musgrave and Daniel and William L. Turney of Fairmont, West Virginia. Aside from family and business affairs and estate settlements, subjects include Missouri frontier life and society in 1836; strife at Lecompton, Kansas School Territory, in 1857; local history of the Fairmont area; and Fairmont Normal School. About 2 ins. of material concerns coal mining, including account books showing coal prices for the Monongahela Gas and Coal Co. of West Virginia and papers concerning production of gas from coal.