Chiefly letters written by members of the related Turner, Baker, and Wheeler families, describing their activities as they moved southward and westward from Massachusetts and New York. Includes letters from Otis and Oliver Baker, theology students at Yale University; Baker and Turner family letters from Lockport and Watertown, New York; letters from Susie Turner, student at Mount Holyoke College (Class of 1853) and teacher at Rockford Seminary; letters from Asa Turner, travelling salesman in the South and Midwest; correspondence between Avery Turner, Cornell University Class of 1873, and his friends at Quincy College and Kansas City Medical College, and later letters relating his work as an engineer for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. Among the Wheeler papers are letters between relatives at an academy in New Bradford, Mass, and at Amherst College; letters from Marshall Wheeler relate to his activities as a clerk in Shelbyville, Kentucky, as a farm owner in Carthage, Ill., as the proprietor of a merchandising business at Quincy, Ill., and to his life as a merchant, plantation and slave owner, and stock and hog producer at Sabine and Cold Springs, Texas.