Christopher Miner Spencer Collection

This composite collection contains both primary and secondary resource materials by and about Christopher M. Spencer and the Spencer family.  Items directly associated with C.M. Spencer include patent and business documents, domestic accounts and receipts, correspondence, land deeds, personal memoirs, photographs and artifacts.  Newspaper and magazine articles describe Spencer’s career, his inventions, and in particular his development of the repeating rifle and the automatic screw machine.

Other Spencer family materials include typescript transcriptions of correspondence by his wife Georgette Taylor Rogers about nursing school in Hartford, CT (1879-1880), by his father-in-law George Washington Rogers, Captain of the steamship Peytona, to his wife Frances Linnell Taylor Rogers from Valparaiso [Chile?] (1854-1867), and letters by his daughter Vesta Taylor Spencer from Europe (1953).