This collection includes photocopies of newspaper articles regarding early Kansas white settler Amelia Pardee Ellis McQueen and her two husbands, who both fought in the Civil War. The collection also includes a copy of "A Biographical Sketch of the McQueen and Pardee Ancestors of Dana Lee Thorne," a narrative genealogy. The McQueen and Pardee families lived in Miami County and Greenwood County, Kansas.

The manuscript is an early history of the Eureka Methodist Episcopal Church specifically from 1865-1885, as well as a history of the town of Eureka, Geenwood County, Kansas in general, with tangential reference to other churches operating at the time. The history is followed by a timeline of improvements to the church building and organ, dating from 1893 through 1978.

In this 1886-1887 journal and in later memoirs, begun in 1944, Colwell Orson Spalding describes his Spalding family ancestry, his life in Bates County, Missouri from the late 1860s to 1880, and his married years in Kansas and Missouri.