During the recent EAC in Annapolis I was able to make a side trip to the Hagley Library in Wilmington. This was carefully timed so as not to miss John Kraljevich's excellent walking tour of old Annapolis. I had been to Annapolis probably half a dozen times to do work at the Maryland State Archives for the Baltimore gold hoard book, but such was my monomania that I had only visited two places in the city, the Archives and a pizza place in the strip mall a little bit west of there.

The dignity of that book was such that I could not discuss how great the pizza was, fortunately The E-Sylum has enough latitude for such digressions. Did I mention that the pizza was really good? There were great documents in the Archives, too.

But it was all superseded by John's walking tour, which included the Charles Carroll house (a plaque bears a reproduction of the Charles Carroll medal by Christian Gobrecht), and the possible "first Mint" of the United States, where the Chalmers pieces may have been struck (later at the EAC, Will Mumford gave a fascinating talk about his excavation of the property, which uncovered a Chalmers piece buried in the cellar).

Now on to Hagley - this is the old DuPont family library, now open to the public, and the grounds are spectacular. The reading room would make Thoreau proud - curators bringing old books on one side and a floor to ceiling view of unspoiled countryside on the other.

Hagley has a strong collection of industrial trade catalogs, and I had known for some time that they had a number of early Frank H. Stewart Electric Company catalogs which are probably unique - not even present in Stewart's personal papers at Rowan University. These lent some additional insight on the early days of the company (prior to their acquisition of the first U.S. Mint building in Philadelphia), but the real prize was something I found by sheer luck while cruising their online catalog prior to visiting.

Catalogued as an "account book of the chief coiners of the United States Mint," hopes were raised that this was the long lost first account book of Henry Voigt from 1792, obliquely referred to in Snowden's Mint Manual (1860) and missing ever since. I didn't get that lucky, but what we have here is a personal account book of Voigt which indicates a business relationship with Adam Eckfeldt, outside of the Mint, personal loans to John Reich, and a possible accounting of Jefferson inauguration medals (Julian PR-2).

The book was acquired by Hagley in the 1960s - where it was before that is anyone's guess, although certain notations in the book suggest it stayed in the Voigt family. Further study is underway and will be published in due course. I can't imagine anyone (with the possible exception of Eric Newman!) would have found this without an online catalog, and we are fortunate to live in the era where all these resources are first appearing and we get to be the ones to harvest them.

Joel Orosz adds:

To learn more about the Hagley library, see:About the Hagley Library(www.hagley.org/library/about/)