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The University of Michigan Thorne, Jonathan, b. 1801 Letterbook |
Jonathan Thorne was a prominent figure in New York commercial circles. Born in 1801, he went to New York City in 1830 and established himself as a manufacturer and merchant of leather goods. He also raised cattle in Duchess County and had extensive land holdings in Michigan. The letterbook contains correspondence pertaining exclusively to Thorne's business affairs. Most of the earlier letters deal with his management of accounts in his leather business, but he later became more concerned, at least in his letters, with the management of his property in Michigan, specifically with his economic relationship with his tenants, his efforts to keep his taxes paid up and to collect his rents. The letters are primarily useful for their illumination of the financial aspects of absentee ownership of land in the nineteenth century, and would be most interesting to those scholars concerned with the employment of land on the frontier and with the relationships of farmers to land owners.
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