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Emmanuel Taylor Gordon papers, 1881-1980.

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@ Montana Historical Society Research Center

Description

Scope and content: The collection is arranged into four subgroups. The first two are Taylor Gordon and Rose Gordon, each including correspondence, financial records, legal documents, writings, clippings, and miscellany. Correspondence addressed to both Taylor and Rose is filed in a separate chronological order in the Taylor Gordon subgroup as incoming correspondence. A third subgroup for the Gordon Family contains the materials of other family members. Correspondence from Taylor and Rose to the family is included in this series and is noted in the inventory. The final subgroup is Miscellany and contains materials for the White Sulphur Springs school; Florence Mining Company; Frank Phelps; Jessie and William Wellman; C.H. and P.H. Willard; Maud W. Crosby; Charles Tipton; Frank, Richard G., Mary L., and Charles H. Wight; etc.; Emmanuel Taylor Gordon, was born April 29, 1893, in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, the youngest of five children of John Francis Gordon and Mary Anna Goodall Gordon. In Cairo, Illinois, in 1879, John Gordon, who claimed descent from Zulu ancestors, married Mary Anna Goodall, who had been born in slavery in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1853. The couple, and their baby son Robert, moved to Montana from Illinois in 1881, coming up the Missouri River on a steamboat. John Gordon worked as a cook in the mining camps of Barker and Castle. Their daughter Rose was born in Barker in 1883. About 1884 or 1885 the family moved to White Sulphur Springs where they remained--- the town's only African American family.; The senior...

Record Contributed By

Montana Historical Society Research Center

Record Harvested From

Big Sky Country Digital Network