I. Vermont Allen Files,, 1915-1939

Summary: Vermont Allen's Papers include diaries, correspondence, notebooks, and materials related to his studies at Rutgers and his law studies and career.

The diaries for the years 1924 and 1925 provide the most information about Allen, particularly his life as a young student and recent graduate of Rutgers. The entries are brief, as each page represented a day, and do not go into heavy details. In them, he expressed his concern about finding a job and a career after graduation. He writes about his time in Georgia and North Carolina, where he worked as a teacher. In his daily entries, Allen almost always includes information about the weather, his daily activities (when he woke up, went to bed, what work he did, who he spoke with). Occasionally, Allen mentions a current event he read about in the newspaper, or a movie he saw, or the sermon he heard at church. Allen also writes about his perceptions of African Americans (whom he refers to as "colored") and took an interest in news events about other African Americans and the Ku Klux Klan. People of interest that he mentions interacting with include professors at Rutgers, such as Irving S. Kull and Eugene Greider; Austen Crehore, a World War I aviator for the Lafayette Squadron in France; and one of Rutgers most famous graduates, Paul Robeson, with whom Allen discussed his job prospects.

The diaries also document Allen's initial meeting and early courtship of Katherine Merriwether, whom he would marry in 1929. For the most part, Allen never went into depth regarding his feelings about Merriwether, but this is typical of the journal. Allen, for the most part, wrote a sentence or two about his reactions to and feelings about events. On occasion, he wrote in another language (German and what appears to be a code transliterating English or German into Greek letters), perhaps when he did not want anyone who came across the journal to easily understand what he was saying.

The correspondence folder consists largely of Christmas cards to Allen and his wife along with some letters from Merriwether's family. Notebooks and Writings contains both high school and college notebooks, along with a seven-page story Allen wrote on the back of Last Will and Testament form.

Other material in the folders includes tickets, newsletters related to Allen's law work, and two photographs of Allen (the same that appears in his senior photo in the Scarlet Letter 1925 yearbook), and a photo of Merriwether.