Hawkins Family Papers

The Hawkins Family Papers chiefly document white male family members, including Philemon Hawkins (1752-1833), John Davis Hawkins (1781-1858), and William J. Hawkins (1819-1894), and others of Warren, Franklin, and Wake counties, N.C., who owned and managed plantations; enslaved people; served as state and federal officials, including as an agent to the Creek people and superintendent of all tribes of Indigenous peoples south of the Ohio River; and worked as railroad executives, bankers, commission merchants, machinery and phosphate manufacturers, and operators of other enterprises in North Carolina and several adjacent states. Enslaved people are documented in letters exchanged between white family members, in deeds and bills of sale, and in account books. The collection includes extensive business and personal correspondence, 1738-1893, of several generations of the Hawkins family. Also included are papers of other nearby socially and politically influential related families and correspondence with relatives who lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida, and other states. Volumes up to 1865 relate primarily to agriculture and railroads; the remainder of the volumes are account books, letter books, inventories, order and shipping records, and other records. Among companies important in the papers are Hawkins, Williamson & Company, cotton brokerage and commission merchants of Baltimore, and its successor Hawkins & Company; C. M. Hawkins & Company, which continued Hawkins & Company; the Pioneer Manufacturing Company of Raleigh, N.C., distributor of agricultural supplies; and the North Carolina Phosphate Company, incorporated in 1885, with its main offices at Raleigh and works at Castle Hayne, N.C.