Old receipts and ledgers

Here are the pics of the old paper lot I picked up. Mostly 1870-72
Most of the stores were from NY and this person Clark was last name was from center brook CT and must have had large farm or store owner maybe?

 

I have more pictures but could not upload. Every file was too large. Many More like the pic shown.

 

reduce the file size to under 1 mb.....and they load fine.

( if you're thinking to sell them here.....start new thread in the SELL section...)

 

Use a photo processing program to resize your pictures to about 700 to 1000 pixels across, file size under 500KB. Save the resized images and then upload.

 

I wonder whether the NHRR on the second one stands for New Haven Rail Road....

 

480x640 works every time.

 

Had a chance this morning to see what I could find out about "C L Clarke of Centre Brook, Conn." Turns out that the village of "Centerbrook" is in Middlesex County, near Essex. Mr. Clarke actually spelled his name without the "e" at the end - Charles L Clark.

He was born in late 1850, son of a farming family, but in 1870 at 19 he was already a "clerk in store" when his family was enumerated, living in the postal district of Westbrook, in the town of Old Saybrook. By 1880, living in the village of Centerbrook, town of Essex, he has risen to "merchant" and owns the store. He and his family continued living in the same general area and he continued operating a general merchandise retail store until at least 1930 (he was 79!)

 

Wow awesome information! He must have had a fairly large general store as some of the receipts were several hundred dollars..

 

You're welcome, Mike. But you should look at those receipts more carefully. The decimal points must be very light. I don't see anything like "several hundred dollars" on those.

 

That was just a very small amount of them.. I have many many more and some are very long ledger type lists attached to them. Beleive I saw a se
Over $1000

 

Oh, I see. How long a period of time do they span?

 

I haven't checked them all but think was 70-72

 

NHRR is an abbreviation for the New Haven for sure, and in context that's probably who it is. They would have been the railroad shipping the goods in.

 

Isn't @silverthwait from this general area of CT?

 

I'm up near Hartford. New Haven is right on the coastline; it was a big shipping port at the time.

 

Yes. But Mr. Clark and his store were east of NH - from towns on the western shore of the Connecticut River near its mouth. Old Saybrook, Essex, etc.

 

Makes sense. The New Haven ran along the coast. Those towns are one of the most expensive parts of the State these days, along with Greenwich and Fairfield counties.