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A collection of court records, genealogies, historical sketches and other materials relating to Hampshire and Mineral counties in West Virginia and surrounding areas in Virginia and Maryland. Subjects include a naturalist description of the area and an early history of the region including Indians, white settlement, the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. There is material on the Civil War and World War I and World War II veterans.

The interviews, correspondence, notes and reports of a Wisconsin based, New York born antiquarian and early researcher of frontier history. Lyman C. Draper's manuscripts were willed to the Wisconsin State Historical Society where he had been its corresponding secretary and instrumental in its development. Microfilm was produced by the society of his papers and made available for purchase to libraries because of their significance for studying the Eastern frontier and its pioneers. Draper had originally planned to publish on the basis of these manuscripts a series of books on frontier history and biographies of famous pioneers. Only one was published, King's Mountain and Its Heroes. Draper, in his writings, generally reflected biases common to white male Americans of the nineteenth century but he collected many documents and interviewed women, Native Americans, and African Americans connected with the frontier and their descendents. Indeed he had collected enough material that he had decided to write biographies of chiefs: Tecumseh and Joseph Brant. Other materials for biographies are of white frontier notables such as Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, Lewis Wetzel, Simon Kenton, and Samuel Brady. His papers are also organized regionally with holdings encompassing an area bordered by the western parts of Virginia and the Carolinas and portions of Georgia and Alabama, encompassing the entire Ohio River Valley, and part of the upper Mississippi Valley from the era of frontier conflicts in the 1740's and 1750's to the American Revolution and the War of 1812.