| Description: |
The Gardiner Fulton Papers, spanning the dates, 1813-1889, consists of .3 linear feet of financial documents, correspondence, and ephemera. The forty-nine items in this collection contain clues about the life of a mid-nineteenth-century farmer in Philadelphia County, which is located in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania. Fulton resided for a time in Oxford Township, but spent most of his life in rural Frankford, a farm community and the first stage stop north of Philadelphia on the Philadelphia-Trenton Turnpike. The documents record numerous transactions between Gardiner Fulton and the E.I. du Pont de Nemours Company during the early years of its gunpowder manufacturing business in Wilmington, Delaware. Founder of the company Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (1771-1834) traveled to Philadelphia often, and letters in the collection imply that du Pont and Fulton saw each other during some of these journeys. |
