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Biography/History:
William Dunbar was born near Elgin, Morayshire, Scotland, in 1749. He was the youngest son of Sir Archibald and Anne Bayne Dunbar. After receiving his early education in Glasgow, Scotland, William Dunbar pursued further studies in astronomy and mathematics in London, England. He immigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1771, and later began a trading route on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. After traveling to Jamaica to buy slaves, Dunbar visited Pensacola, British West Florida, and obtained title to lands near New Richmond (Baton Rouge), Louisiana, where he settled in 1773 and began planting cotton. He lost many slaves in a 1775 insurrection, and marauder James Willing attacked Dunbar’s plantation in a 1778 raid on Loyalist planters. Spanish soldiers raided his plantation in 1779, burning fences and destroying crops.
Dunbar eventually settled on a plantation located nine miles south of Natchez in 1783, and he built a mansion known as the Forest. In 1785, he married Dinah Clark, who was born in Whitehaven, England, on October 20, 1769. The Dunbars had several children, including Eliza (b. 1791), William, Jr. (1793-1847), Archibald (d. 1798), Thomas (d. 1801), Alexander (d. 1852), Robert (d. 1854), Ann, Helen, and Margaret. Dinah Clark Dunbar died at the Forest on November 15, 1821.
In the Natchez District, Dunbar planted cotton, indigo, and tobacco, and he shipped ochre pigment to Boston. He also introduced the square cotton bale, invented the screwpress, and began extracting cottonseed oil almost a century before this process would be industrialized. Dunbar also worked as a surveyor for the Spanish government. He was appointed by Spanish governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos to establish the line of demarcation between Spain and the United States in 1798. Dunbar was also appointed surveyor general of the Natchez District. He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society, and he published numerous scientific articles in the journal of the society. Dunbar corresponded with Andrew Ellicott, Sir William Herschell, Thomas Jefferson, and David Rittenhouse. He also built a chemical laboratory and an observatory at the Forest. William Dunbar died at the Forest on October 16, 1810.
William Dunbar, Jr., was born on June 19, 1793. He was a graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and he later received a medical degree in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Dunbar was an elder at Carmel Presbyterian Church in Natchez in 1825. He married Mary Field in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1827. Born on January 27, 1801, she was the daughter of Robert and Abigail Stockton Field of New Jersey. The Dunbars had six children: Field (1828-1854), Richard (1830-1839), Mary (b. 1832), Helen (1833-1836), Charlotte (1836-1905), and Julia (1840-1917). Dr. William Dunbar, Jr., died on December 8, 1847. Mary Field Dunbar died in Pass Christian, Harrison County, Mississippi, on May 3, 1875.
Field Dunbar was born on January 27, 1828. After graduating from the College of New Jersey, he returned to manage the Forest. Dunbar married Mary Brown Williams (1832-1880) in Adams County in 1851. The Dunbars had at least three children: Virginia (1852-1935),William (1853-1854), and Richard Field (1855-1922). The Forest burned on January 13, 1852, and it was later rebuilt. Field Dunbar died at his home in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, on November 9, 1854.
Virginia Dunbar married the Reverend Stewart McQueen (b. 1857) in Adams County, Mississippi, on November 1, 1883. They had at least one child: Douglass (b. 1884). Stewart McQueen died on October 5, 1923, and he was buried in Montgomery, Alabama.
Douglass McQueen was born on December 16, 1884. He married Mildred Gee Ray (1897-1979), and they had at least one child: Douglass McQueen, Jr., who was born on January 30, 1923. Douglass McQueen, Sr., died on January 7, 1962. Douglass McQueen, Jr., was living in Homewood, Alabama, in 1994.
Scope and Content:
This collection contains correspondence, photographs, a scrapbook, journals, poetry, financial records, genealogical research, publications, newsclippings, and miscellaneous papers related to the William Dunbar family or allied families.
Various Dunbar family members wrote most of the correspondence during the late nineteenth century. However, there is an 1839 letter from Dr. William Dunbar, Jr., to George T. Olmsted in Princeton, New Jersey, describing a large party at the Forest. Field Dunbar also wrote several letters from Princeton, New Jersey, to his father in Natchez describing his finances, his studies at the College of New Jersey, and his graduation in 1846. Other correspondents include Mary Dunbar, Virginia Dunbar McQueen, and Douglass McQueen, Sr. A copy of the will of Julia Dunbar Greene is attached to a 1920 letter to Mrs. Stewart McQueen concerning the settlement of Greene’s estate.
The photographs are black-and-white in format, and almost all of them are identified. Some of the photographs were taken at the Forest, near Natchez, or at photographic studios in Natchez. Included are portraits of Mary Dunbar; Douglass McQueen, Sr.; Virginia Dunbar McQueen; Douglass McQueen, Jr.; the parlor at the Forest; Dunbar family relatives G. Green and Hyde Rust; and Mammy Lucy. There are also photographs of original portraits of William Dunbar and Dinah Clark Dunbar. Other subjects include Julian McQueen; Mary McQueen; and C. A. Kimbrough at the site of the wreck of the steamboat, Star of the West, on the Tallahatchie River in 1889. A number of photographs of people and several photographic calling cards were also removed from an album. Less than half of the album photographs are identified, but known subjects include Adrienne T. Hunter, Eliza Hutchins, and Douglass McQueen, Sr.; Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina Howell Davis; and a number of Confederate generals. Most of the album photographs are undated.
On April 24, 1854, Mary Brown Williams Dunbar began keeping a scrapbook while living on the Louisiana plantation, Scotland. The scrapbook contains newsclippings of obituaries and wedding announcements from a number of places, including Natchez, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Memphis, Tennessee; and Arkansas, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Many of the newsclippings concern Dunbar family members. There is also a 1792 letter from Mary Boling Fleming to an unidentified sister. The back of the scrapbook contains newsclippings of contemporary poems.
A paginated 1867 journal kept by Mary Field Dunbar contains transcriptions of poems by authors such as Robert Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lord Alfred Tennyson, as well as unidentified poems. A note in the back of the journal indicates that it was started at Princeton in 1867 and finished at Natchez in 1870. There is also a brief, anonymous diary that dates from September and October of 1846. The author was apparently attending college, as he describes some of his classes along with a few hunting trips.
Although Field Dunbar wrote two poems in 1833 and 1839, Virginia Dunbar McQueen wrote most of the remaining poems in the 1860s. A few poems are anonymous.
The financial records include seven one-thousand-dollar bonds from S. H. Greene and Sons Corporation of Rhode Island. The bonds, dated April 1, 1919, matured in twenty years. There is a 1930 letter from the Industrial Trust Company of Rhode Island to the First National Bank of Montgomery, Alabama, concerning the bonds. Also included is a 1931 Adams County tax receipt for the Forest.
The genealogical research is primarily on the Dunbar, Field, and Stockton families, and it includes research correspondence, a few original documents, copies of source materials, genealogical notes, and a genealogical chart. Douglass McQueen, Jr., of Birmingham, Alabama, wrote or received the letters in response to his research inquiries in the 1960s. The original documents include an 1899 certificate of membership eligibility in the New Jersey Society of the Colonial Dames of America. There is an undated, informal will of Julia Dunbar Greene in which she itemizes many personal possessions intended for her three nieces: Virginia Dunbar McQueen, Marian Dunbar Davis, and Helen Davis Gousset. There is also an 1851 marriage license of Field Dunbar and Mary Brown Williams, an 1854 obituary of Field Dunbar, and a posthumous tribute to him printed by the Natchez Daily Courier. The genealogical notes provide information on several allied Dunbar families, including the Stocktons. There are four undated genealogical journals containing handwritten notes on the Dunbar, Field, and Stockton families of England, Scotland, and Mississippi. The journals are anonymous, but Virginia Dunbar McQueen and Mary McQueen may have created at least two of them. There is also an oversized Dunbar genealogical chart that traces the family from the eleventh through the twentieth centuries.
The publications include an 1861 manual entitled Regulations for the Army of the Confederate States, which belonged to Robert Kimmon Gray. There is a 1939 publication entitled Pocahontas: Bright Stream Between Two Hills, by Marguerite Stuart Quarles, and an undated publication entitled Description of the Marriage of Pocahontas. There is also an undated biographical sketch entitled "William Dunbar: A Product of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Renaissance," by Arthur H. DeRosier, Jr.
The newsclippings concerning the Forest are from twentieth-century Alabama and Mississippi newspapers. Several of the newsclippings include pictures of the mansion before it burned.
The miscellaneous papers include blueprints for a proposed William Dunbar museum. There is an advertisement for the 1905 unveiling of a Confederate monument in Carrollton, Mississippi, and an anonymous 1947 account of the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Series Identification:
Box 1, folder 1
Box 2, folders 1-2
Box 2, folder 6
Box 2, folders 4-5
Box 1, folder 2
Box 3, folder 1
Box 1, folders 5-7
Box 1, folder 3 (n.d.)
Box 2, folder 3 (1861; 1939; n.d.)
Box 3, folder 2
Box 1, folder 4
Box List: