A letter to Henry Blood Esq (New York)

and an archive comes home…

27 June 1870

Henry Blood Esq

New York
Dr Sir

Your favor 23rd at hand this a.m. The eighteen deeds for Pottawatamie lands reached me the 25th and were acknowledged & forwarded–What do you pay the commissioner for acknowledgements? On the first five deeds I paid one dollar each, on the last lot 66 ⅔ cents each–the price seems to me extravagant–but I could do no better–

Mr. Peter left here on Friday for Saint Louis, thence to Kansas. The last of our iron, to finish to Emporia, must have reached Saint Louis on Tuesday of last week, and if it can be got through without much delay, Peter says the road can be completed by the 15th July–He wants a meeting of the Ex.Comm. at Topeka or Emporia as soon thereafter as possible, about which he has written to Mr. Keyes.

Please send me a copy of the paper in reference to sale of bonds, that was to have been prepared by [Misters?] Opdyke Ellis & yourself.

Yours truly Tho. Sherlock

Henry Blood, Collection Kansas Memory

Henry Blood was the director and vice-president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway between 1870 and 1872 and NHS has (now had) dozens of letters written to him concerning the raising of funds for the new railway. Just a month after this letter was written, on July 20, the rails did indeed reach Emporia. This location proved to be a lucrative location transporting cattle.

Potawatomi delegation to Washington, 1855-65, Library of Congress

Blood was also deeply involved with the dispersal of the Potawatamie lands in Kansas Territory. The Treaty of 1867 certified the purchase of lands by the railroad in exchange for $150,000. The Potawatomi used the funds to acquire a reservation in Indian Territory. Unfortunately no money was alloted for resettlement and for over 20 years, Potawatomi families made their way from Kansas to Oklahoma. Read more here

Who was Henry Blood and how was he connected to Norwich? We found him in the 1860 Norwich census. Here he is at the bottom of the page. In looking at his record, something immediately stands out: He had $240,000 in real estate and $152,500 in his personal estate. Right above him is listed one of the most successful lawyers in town with real estate valued at $7500. They were neighbors, so how was this possible? It’s not a typo–at the bottom of the page the total real estate for the entire page adds up correctly to $284,000.

Further investigation reveals that his wife was born in Tennessee and his children were born in in Louisiana, Texas, and Tennessee.

Henry Blood was born in Norwich in 1811. Blood was a “planter,” land speculator, and businessman. He became a shipping agent in New Orleans and then moved to Nashville where he met and married Laura Shelby, daughter of a plantation owner. The 1850 census lists him as a Planter, residing in Brazoria, Texas, with 15 enslaved workers. Henry moved with his family back to Norwich around 1859 and managed a Tennessee plantation inherited by his wife.

Interestingly, while managing his enslaved people from Norwich during the Civil War he at the same time gave each man in Norwich who signed up to fight $10.

Henry Blood lived in this house on Main Street during the Civil War from where he managed his interests in the South. Blood died in 1885 and is buried in Fairview Cemetery.

While reading these papers and investigating Henry Blood, we wondered why we only had his papers from after the Civil War. He must have kept other records, but where were they? We looked through archival listings in Tennessee and Kansas to no avail.

She had used them for years with her history students, but was now ready to sell them. We reached out to Rauner Library to see if they would be interested in acquiring the documents as NHS could not afford to purchase them and we felt that they are of national significance and belonged at an academic institution. Dartmouth was able to acquire the collection and we then donated our letter collection to Rauner so the archive would be complete.

It is an extraordinary story of a Vermonter, heading to the South, making enormous amounts of money and then transferring that wealth after the war to building the West. As a consequence many, many people suffered and died.

This winter an email arrived from a former Norwich resident now living in Minnesota regarding some papers she had concerning a Henry Blood from Norwich.

She had used them for years with her history students, but was now ready to sell them. We reached out to Rauner Library to see if they would be interested in acquiring the documents as NHS could not afford to purchase them and we felt that they are of national significance and belonged at an academic institution. Dartmouth was able to acquire the collection and we then donated our letter collection to Rauner so the archive would be complete.

It is an extraordinary story of a Vermonter, heading to the South, making enormous amounts of money and then transferring that wealth after the war to building the West. As a consequence many, many people suffered and died.

Thank you to Dan Bornstein for narrating this letter.
Thank you to Rauner Library for partnering with us to bring this archive home. You can browse the archive by clicking here.