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Correspondence and miscellaneous business papers including Civil War letters exchanged between John C. Buchanan and his wife, Sophia Bingham Buchanan, while he was serving as first lieutenant in Co. D. of the 8th Michigan Infantry. Many of the letters are almost sermons and philosophical essays about his home and family, religion, his country and the war and its leaders. Others are detailed descriptions of camps and camp life, such as Seabrook plantation in South Carolina and its Negroes, James Island and its reptiles; his quarters and food; sea transports; marches, skirmishes and battles with the Army of the Potomac in the Maryland campaign and around Fredericksburg. The collection also includes letters from Claude Buchanan while he was a student at the University of Michigan; letters (1847-1858) of J. Irwin Beaumont of Mississippi and Minnesota to Angie Bingham (Gilbert); notebooks, speeches, business papers, and a diary of a trip to the South in 1884 made by Claude Buchanan.

Edward Bruce Williamson was a noted entomologist and botanist in the early part of the 20th century. He spent most of his career as an amateur, but active and well-respected, scholar of odonata (dragon and damselflies) and served as the curator of odonata for the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology from 1916 to his retirement in 1933. He also owned and maintained the Longfield Iris Farm in Bluffton, Indiana where he propagated award-winning irises. The collection includes correspondence, drawing, field notes and reports from his collecting trips, and photographs.

The Edward Bruce Williamson collection contains material dating from 1891 and spanning the next forty years until his death in 1933. Most of the collection focuses on Williamson's activities as an entomologist, though also it includes some personal correspondence and photographs. The collection is divided into four series, Correspondence, 1891-1935, Drawings, Miscellaneous, Notes and Paper Drafts, and Photographs.