Bauman Belden: Perhaps Overlooked but Not Forgotten

Bauman Belden is the kind of person you often encounter in therecords of old institutions: the ones running the show but not necessarily the ones peopleremember. These are exactly the people most familiar to researchers and archivists,however. With someone like Belden-the Society's secretary from 1896 to 1916 -theinstitution's records are like their own personal files, with much of the correspondence,internal and external, coming to and from them. Belden served the Society at an importanttime, as it was transformed from a rootless and club-like 19th-century entity into aformidable 20th-century research institution and museum, with its own building, asuperior research collection, professional staff, and secure scholarly footing under theleadership of the big names people do remember, Edward Newell and Archer Huntington.

Belden was 23 when he joined the ANS in 1886, and it wasn't long before he was taking anactive role in its affairs. In 1891 he became chair of the Society's room committee, placinghim in a position of high visibility to the Society's membership, as it put him in charge oforganizing the meetings that took place in the Society's rented rooms. He would schedulespeakers, prepare announcements, and help make important decisions, like whether toinvite women to a particular meeting or how to appropriately acknowledge and displaysome books given by one of the Society's most important donors. Belden was full of ideasand eager to help implement them. When he suggested in 1892 that the Society publish thelast four years of its proceedings along with the various papers read at meetings, he wasput in charge of a committee to get it done. At that time he also became the Society'slibrarian, a position he held for five years.

Born in Brooklyn in 1862, Belden was living in Elizabeth, New Jersey, by the time he joinedthe ANS. A proud member of the New Jersey Society of the Sons of the AmericanRevolution, he traced his lineage back to his namesake, his German-born great-greatgrandfather, Sebastian Bauman, a merchant and the last officer to leave New York when theAmericans evacuated in 1776. With an appetite for US history generally, he belonged toseveral New York and Pennsylvania historical societies. He went to school in NewBrunswick, New Jersey, as preparation to attend Rutgers but never did go to college.Instead, he said, he in Newark. In 1886, the year he joinedthe Society, he began working at the New York Customs House. The census of 1900 hashim as a government inspector. He married his wife Corinne Crittenden in 1897, and thetwo had a daughter, also named Corinne, who was born the following year.

We can't say for certain what brought Belden to the ANS as a young man or what hiscollecting interests were in 1886, though we might look for some clues in the talks he gavethe following decade, which included, the and We might also consider the gifts he gave the Society in those early years, whichbegan in 1891 with a handful of rupees and other coins, and was followed by an eclecticassortment of US store cards, patriotic and political medals, some more modern worldcoins, and a couple of ancients. He continued giving in this scattershot vein until his deathdecades later. One of his last gifts was a few lunch tokens from a Philadelphia high school

His final donation, in 1930, was of two copies of the US mint medals that had beenpresented to James Ross Snowden and Robert Patterson.

Though Belden would show an interest in other areas-presenting a paper on the siegecoins of Europe in 1915, for instance - increasingly his focus was on US medals anddecorations. Never shy with big ideas, he was at the center of an impossibly ambitious planannounced in 1896 to There is,however, no evidence that any such project was ever undertaken.

Some of Belden's personal papers survive in the ANS archives, including research materialsfor his various publications. Among them is an unpublished manuscript for a book he wasworking on when he died. It was the Society's curator, Howland Wood, who hadsuggested its topic in 1928, when he asked, Belden took to the idea with his usual gusto, approaching it as he didhis other projects, shooting off letters to anyone he could think of who might provideinformation-city and state agencies, shipping bureaus, utility companies, historicalsocieties. He also wrote to the US mint, which opened its records to him after the chiefengraver realized that going

Sometimes Belden's outreach was rewarded, and his mailbox was filled with detaileddescriptions of medals, biographies of award recipients, pamphlets, and newsletters. Other times he got back little more than referrals to other agencies. All Cleveland mayorJohn Marshall could offer was a suggestion that he He was referring to the Carnegie Hero FundCommission, and Belden did write to them.

Belden also found medals to include in his book purely by chance. Wood happened to bereading the morning papers one day and saw that a new type of award was beingpresented by the American Bureau of Shipping, a valor medal given for heroism at sea, andhe suggested that Belden write for a specimen. Belden did, and he received a copy of themedal for the ANS cabinet.

For more information on the ANS, see:
https://numismatics.org/