Visitors today

This morning we had home schoolers visit the Bullis Room.  We are doing a class on Core Library Skills at the Macedon Public Library and  we wanted the students to be aware that many libraries have special places where additional information can be found on a research topic.  The Bullis Room is such a place and is an excellent resource for primary source information.  The student's initial comments were about the smell - smelled like old books and a bit of smoke.  (We had a fire in 2001 and the smell does linger a little.)  They were shown some of the great illustrations in Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York (c1899) and the Notes on Tulip species by W.R. Dykes (1930).  Some pulled items off the shelves to peruse.  The biggest hits were the Atlas of Wayne County (1874)  and a bound copy of the Macedon Newsgatherer from the 1890's on loan to the Bullis Room.  The students enjoyed looking for the roads their homes were on - a few of those roads did not exist in 1874.  And they enjoyed the advertisements and the "people" section of the Newsgatherer.  So if you are researching at your local public library remember that there may be other resources that aren't quite evident on your initial search. Ask your librarian to help you.  And if you are researching in the Macedon, NY, area, please be sure to look at our listing in the OWWL.org catalog in the advanced search (limiting to Bullis Room).  The Bullis collection of books is so wide and varied that there is sure to be something that would provide a wee bit of information.

War of 1812

Yesterday we received notice of a Bicentennial Symposium on the War of 1812 in Oswego NY .  And we started wondering what materials we might have in the Bullis Book Collection that were on that topic.  To our surprise there were several.  They will be on display in our Bullis display case.  One of them includes the transcript of Major-General James Wilkinson's trial on charges of neglect of duty and unofficer-like conduct.  He has included that in his 3 volume Memoirs of my own times.  Another is Thomas Wilson's The Biography of American Military and Naval Heroes.  In this little two volume set you will find the biography of the "Hero of Lake Erie", Captain Oliver Hazard Perry.  Theodore Roosevelt has written two volumes titled The Naval War of 1812.  Willis J. Abbot has a wonderful book titled The Naval History of the United States with 150 illustrations.  The above photo is from that book. Lieut.-General Winfield Scott had a long military career which is written about in Mansfield's The Life and Military Services of Lieut.-General Winfield Scot.  There's a great drawing of him tearing down the British flag at Fort George.  In Lossing's A Centennial Edition of the History of the United States(1876) we have an engraving of Perry on Lake Erie.  In another of Lossing's books, The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (1868), we find more info on Major-General James Wilkinson , lots of engravings, and good information.  In another book, Mastery Units in American History (1936) by Maurice B. Rovner, we find a really concise explanation of the War of 1812.  We also found that the student who owned this book had class on Monday morning and that "Washington said to stay out of all permanent alliances" (a pencil notation on the title page.)  A tourism book by Silliman, A Gallop Among American Scenery (1881), takes us to the Battle of Lundy's Lane.  It appears that General Scott was there.
 So if you would care to visit these will all be on display, along with the invitation to the Symposium and "The War of 1812: A Bicentennial Resource List" by Preston Pierce, the Regional Archivist for the Rochester (NY) Regional Library Council. 

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

A few weeks ago we had some fun one afternoon looking at this sale bill we found among some documents that recently arrived in the Bullis Room. Especially interesting to us was the list of merchandise for auction and the little details such as terms of sale.

We were also interested to see that auctions (excluding those online) continue to be about the same today as they were way back in 1867. 

Can we conclude, from this, that some things never change? (We'd like to think so.)

Hope you enjoy the photo of the sale bill. The real article is in the Bullis Room, if you'd like a closer look.