Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Guide to the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana Subject Categories: Mining

Summary

Collection ID:
NMAH.AC.0060.S01.01.Mining
Creators:
Warshaw, Isadore, 1900-1969
Dates:
circa 1836-1980
Languages:
English
.
Physical Description:
2.37 Cubic feet
consisting of 5 boxes, 1 folder, 4 oversized folders, 1 map case folder.
Repository:
A New York bookseller, Warshaw assembled this collection over nearly fifty years. The Warshaw Collection of Business Americana: Mining forms part of the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Subseries 1.1: Subject Categories. The Subject Categories subseries is divided into 470 subject categories based on those created by Mr. Warshaw. These subject categories include topical subjects, types or forms of material, people, organizations, historical events, and other categories. An overview to the entire Warshaw collection is available here: Warshaw Collection of Business Americana

Scope and Contents

Scope and Contents
This subject category-Mining consists of material related to the mining industry from the nineteeth and twentieth centuries. The documents span the period circa 1836-1980, but the majority of the materials date from circa 1870-1915. The overwhelming majority of this collection of material relates to mining businesses and related industries in North America, and particularly in the states and territories of the American Southwest (California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico). The collection consists of company correspondence, reports, and other matter; trade literature; investment prospectuses (for individual companies, for brokerage firms specializing in the mining industry, and for particular resources and locations, i.e., Canadian uranium or Coloradan gold); brochures advertising mining, milling, and smelting equipment, or promoting chemical processing techniques for mined materials; tool catalogs; stock certificates; blank forms for professional association membership; subscription blanks for professional journals; articles of incorporation, legislative charters, and other official papers; journal, magazine, and newspaper articles related to mining activity; photographs, stereographs, postcards, and business cards; and one map. Topics covered by the collection include prospecting; financial outlook and economics of the mining industry; working conditions in mines; the nature of mining activity; technological advances in tunneling, drilling, pumping, and refining techniques and equipment; business culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and the social life of mining people. Mined resources covered by the documents in the collection include gold, silver, copper, lead, nickel, uranium, cobalt, zinc, coal, and various forms of stone, sand, and gravel.

Administration

Author
Vanessa Broussard-Simmons and Nicole Blechynden
Sponsor
Funding for partial processing of the collection was supported by a grant from the Smithsonian Institution's Collections Care and Preservation Fund (CCPF).
Immediate Source of Acquisition note
Mining is a portion of the Business Ephemera Series of the Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Accession AC0060 purchased from Isadore Warshaw in 1967. Warshaw continued to accumulate similar material until his death, which was donated in 1971 by his widow, Augusta. For a period after acquisition, related materials from other sources (of mixed provenance) were added to the collection so there may be content produced or published after Warshaw's death in 1969. This practice has since ceased.
Processing Information
In 2016, with funding provided by the Smithsonian Institution's Collections Care and Preservation Fund, the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History implemented the use of minimal level processing standards to increase information about and facilitate access to more of our collections. A large portion of stored material from the original acquisition received minimal level processing, which resulted in additions to this Subject category. This effort included basic arrangement and replacement of non-archival housing for long-term stability, but staples and other fasteners have not all been removed. Revisions to the encoded finding aid were made to reflect the added content in context to the previously processed material.
Minimal level processing and enhancement of the machine-readable finding aid completed by Nicole Blechynden, September 2017.

Using the Collection

Preferred Citation note
Warshaw Collection of Business Americana Subject Categories: Mining, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Conditions Governing Access note
Collection is open for research. Some items may be restricted due to fragile condition.
Conditions Governing Use note
Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives Center makes no guarantees concerning copyright restrictions. Other intellectual property rights may apply. Archives Center cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.

Materials in the Archives Center

Materials in the Archives Center
Archives Center Collection of Business Americana (AC0404)

Forms Part Of


Keywords

Keywords table of terms and types.
Keyword Terms Keyword Types
Business ephemera Genre Form Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Ephemera Genre Form Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Mining Topical Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid

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