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Emerson, John S., Ursula Sophia (Newell) Emerson, et. al.

[Archive of early American missionaries to Hawaii.]

Mostly Hawaii, 1831–1920s.

An extraordinary archive of a noted Hawaiian missionary couple, including over thirty years of epistolary journals, firsthand accounts of voyages to Micronesia and the Marquesas, numerous letters, a substantial collection of Hawaiian photos, several manuscript maps, and a charming original watercolor of the Emerson house in Waialua. Also included are materials gathered and written by their children, including manuscripts, typescripts, and printed materials on Hawaiian missionary life and the history of Hawaii. In all, comprising nearly 900 pages of manuscript journals, letters, and reports, and more than 200 items in total.

John S. and Ursula Sophia (Newell) Emerson arrived in Hawaii as missionaries in 1832, as members of the fifth company of missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. John S. Emerson (1800–67) was born in Chester, New Hampshire, and graduated from Dartmouth College and Andover Theological Seminary. In 1831 he married Ursula Sophia Newell (1806–88), of Nelson, New Hampshire, the couple soon thereafter embarking for Hawaii. Except for an interval at the Mission Seminary at Lahainaluna, Maui in the 1840s and a return visit to the U.S. in 1860–61, the couple spent the rest of their lives in Waialua, Oahu. There, they founded a Protestant Church and established schools—John instructing the boys, Ursula instructing the girls, not only in academics but in singing, sewing, and other domestic work. John is best known for writing the first English-Hawaiian dictionary, and both his and Ursula’s letters and journals include occasional Hawaiian language. Ursula is perhaps best remembered for creating some of the earliest known manuscript maps of Hawaii (none present here), one of which she mentions in her journal as being in progress.

The archive offered here embraces an impressive range and depth of material relating to the Emersons’ lives and missionary activities in Hawaii and beyond. Both Ursula and John kept epistolary journals during their voyage to Hawaii aboard the Averick in 1831–32 and following their arrival. Ursula’s journal contains thorough and regular entries through 1835, and John’s, though with more sporadic entries after the first decade, continues through 1865. Both are engaging and descriptive writers, and their journals address a range of topics, from their own daily lives and labors, including detailed accounts of sometimes scandalous difficulties with their Hawaiian household help, to their observations and updates about native Hawaiian life, culture, and politics, broader missionary activities, and the (mis)perceptions of those activities at home in the U.S. These journals reveal a degree of detail, personality, and immediacy not present in the edited selections printed in their son Oliver’s Pioneer Days in Hawaii. In addition to their epistolary journals, the archive also encompasses journals, letters, and report drafts of the Emersons’ travels through the U.S. from 1860 to 1861 and John’s voyages to the Marquesas, in 1857, and Micronesia, in 1865.

Nearly fifty of the archive’s sixty-one letters are written by members of the Emerson family, and about half of them are from Hawaii, discussing, among other subjects, missionary and Church activities, local festivals, sugar plantation business, and health-related news, including Ursula’s accounts of the spread of leprosy on the island and John’s death. A bronze memorial plaque was later created for John, as revealed by several letters from artist Louis Saint-Gaudens, the brother and assistant of renowned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. In addition to correspondence, the archive’s manuscript material includes a small book of “choice tunes,” likely used by Ursula in the course of her singing classes, and an incomplete account by Ursula of their activities during the 1840s, at Lahainaluna and then back at Waialua during the “desolating scourge[s]” of measles and small pox.

Lending a rich visual dimension to the archive is a collection of almost 150 original photos—mostly cabinet cards and CDVs, most of which were taken in Honolulu—showing members of the Emerson family (including early salt print portraits of John and Ursula), numerous other Hawaiian missionaries and their family members, and several native Hawaiians, including the young James Kekela, the first native Hawaiian to be ordained as a minister. Kekela attended the Emersons’ Waialua school, and went on to devote forty years of his life to missionary work in the Marquesas. The archive also includes a Williams College class photo album with portraits of two Emerson brothers. A charming pencil and watercolor sketch of the Emersons’ house at Waialua, as well as seven manuscript maps are also included. Most of the maps are real-estate related, but the largest is from John’s voyage to Micronesia.

Although most of the Emersons’ sons would return to the U.S. to pursue their degrees and, at least for a time, their careers, the archive also embraces a collection of publications, typescripts, and manuscripts on Hawaiian history, culture, and missionary activity by Oliver Pomeroy, Joseph S., and Nathaniel Emerson. The brothers’ correspondence from the early 1900s reveals the family’s ongoing involvement in Hawaiian politics and economy after their parents’ deaths.

The archive also includes a selection of additional manuscript materials (totalling some 880 pages) from various Emerson family members, including one household book with over a decade’s records of religious, fundraising, and charitable activities from the family house at Waialua; several maps and documents of family property in Hawaii; and several volumes of genealogical material both for the Emerson family and the family of Justin Emerson’s wife Wilimena, who was descended from John Eliot, the so-called “apostle to the Indians.”

A remarkable and exceedingly rare archive documenting the experiences of two of the earliest missionaries active in Hawaii, rich in narrative content and ripe for research.

A PDF with a complete description, including itemization and representative passages, is available here.

Item #7941

Price: $225,000.00