Description
Correspondence, diaries, photographs, account
books and journals, land and tax records, manuscripts, scrapbooks, notes,
transcripts, reports, newspapers, clippings, promotional materials, and ephemera,
relating to the family, life, career, and intellectual pursuits of Orange County,
California, avocado rancher and historian William McPherson (1885-1964). Family
papers document the McPhersons' settlement in Orange County in the 1870s, and their
involvement in local agriculture, first in the raisin grape industry, and then in
the avocado industry. Half the collection consists of original Spanish- and
English-language correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, printed materials, and
ephemera collected by McPherson in the pursuit of his intellectual interests, in
particular the history and anthropology of Orange County--and especially Rancho
Santiago de Santa Ana and San Juan Capistrano--from the 1770s to the 1920s. The
collection includes papers of 19th-century entrepreneur Alfred Henry Wilcox and
California State Assemblyman Jeffry Joseph Prendergast, as well as a large number of
documents with a focus beyond Orange County and Southern California, including Civil
war diaries and letters, a collection of ship logbooks from the 1820s to the 1850s,
literary scrapbooks, and McPherson’s collection of autograph letters and documents
relating primarily to American, British, and California history, and dating from
1665 to 1932.