The archival record at Rokeby Museum is rich and deep. Family letters from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century — a total of more than 15,000 — form the heart of the archives and document both the Robinson and Stevens families. Ann Stevens of Montpelier, Vermont, married Rowland Evans Robinson in 1870 and lived the next fifty years at Rokeby. She made a self-conscious effort to collect her own family’s heritage as she aged, and today the Museum continues this mission. In an arrangement with Middlebury College Special Collections, the Robinson letters are housed at the college in nearby Middlebury, VT, where they are used regularly by students, scholars and the public. The letters occupy fifty-eight document boxes; an index to the letters, and how to access the collection, is available here.
Legal/Account Documents, Diaries, Books, Papers, etc.
Other archival material includes diaries, account books, legal documents, scrapbooks, manuscript writings, farm and household accounts, schoolwork, clippings, etc. that fill twenty-three document boxes and five cartons of arranged papers and bound volumes; another five document boxes house roughly processed material. A finding aid is available here.
The Museum’s large collection of Robinson and Stevens family photographs range from the earliest forms of photography to twentieth-century snap shots. Daguerreotypes and other early cased photographs fill two document boxes. Nineteenth and twentieth-century photographs of identified individuals fill a file cabinet drawer, and landscape photos from the region fill a second. The collection also includes fifteen photograph albums and a box of oversized images.