Manuscript Location

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Library

Place of Origin

United States ➔ Mississippi

Date of Composition

ca. 1841

Description

This manuscript volume of medical and culinary recipes is part of the library's collection of the papers of Lewis Baldwin Parsons, a lawyer, railroad manager, Illinois statesman and farmer, and Chief of Rail and River Transportation of the Union armies during the Civil War, when he achieved the rank of Brigadier General. Descended from early settlers of Massachusetts--both his paternal and maternal grandfathers fought in the Revolutionary War--Parsons was born in Genesee Country, New York, in 1818, and spent his youth around his father's store in St. Lawrenceville. After graduating from from Yale in 1840, he taught for two years in a classical school in Mississippi before entering Harvard Law School, from which he obtained a degree  in 1844. As the library has dated his recipe book ca. 1841, he presumably compiled the book during his teaching years in Mississippi. Baldwin's first wife, Sarah Green Edwards, died in 1850, shortly after giving birth to their daughter, Sarah, and two years later he married her younger sister Julia. Two children of this marriage, Charles and Julia, survived their mother, who died in 1857. He subsequently married Elizabeth Darrah of New York City, who died in 1877. Parsons owned 3,000 acres in Clay County, land that he began buying in the 1850s. As one of the largest farmers in southern Illinois, he resided at Elmwood Farm from 1875 until his death in 1907.

The recipe book is located in Series II > Genealogical Papers, Journals, and other Memorabilia > Box 36 of the Lewis Baldwin Parsons Papers.