George Hammell Cook Papers

"Fortunately for historians, Dr. Cook was a systematic and well-organized man and, in the manner of his century, a very saving man. He and later his wife, Mary Halsey Thomas Cook, and his daughters, Emma and Anne, saved almost all his books, journals, papers, letters, and notebooks. When Anne, who died in 1937, gave the collection to the Rutgers Library there were forty-nine large file boxes of letters and notebooks. Some of these papers were used by Carl R. Woodward and Ingrid Nelson Waller in writing New Jersey's Agricultural Experiment Station: 1880-1930. But when the New Jersey Agricultural Society presented a grant from Charles A. Collins, Vice President of the New Jersey State Board of Agriculture, for the preparation of a biography of George Cook, most of the letters were tied up in red tape as Cook had left them. There are at a rough estimate about 20,000 letters and 124 notebooks. Although their arrangement is still not completed, most of the letters have been filed chronologically and to a lesser extent by subject matter. Written between 1836 and 1890, they throw light on the development of geology and agriculture, the growth of state and federal support for agricultural colleges, experiment stations, and geological surveys; problems of drainage and water supply in New Jersey, and a multitude of other subjects. They also provide a source of information about the customs, pleasures, worries, and habits of their writers."

--Jean Wilson Sidar, "The George Hammell Cook Collection," Journal of the Rutgers University Library, vol. XXXV, nu. 2 (June 1972): 71-73.