Collections : [University of Michigan William L. Clements Library]

Eunice (Clapp) Bidwell (1823?-1899) kept this album as a young woman before and after her marriage. This blank book includes a printed title page headed "Album," and the publisher was "J. C. Riker, N. York." The page shows a sleeping cupid with a lyre labeled "The Dream" with tableau of persons, animals, and statues in the background. Several contributors to the volume identify their location as Hartford Retreat with one written by Thomas H. Gallaudet, chaplain of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane. Charles Baldwin inscribed a page; he May or May not have been a patient at the Retreat. Many entries have Christian religious themes. One author wrote in the volume the day before Bidwell's marriage on June 9, 1845. Additional printed illustrations include "The Cottage Girl," "Boston, and Bunker Hill," "Saratoga Lake," "The Rigs O'Barley," and "Light House Near Caldwell's Landing (Hudson River)." Three newspaper clippings of poems and a label from a Rose extract container are laid in.