Ellen Douglas Bellamy Journal

This collection consists entirely of photocopies of pages from a journal or school exercise book kept by Miss Ellen Douglas Bellamy during the Civil War. Some time later, possibly in the 1870s, the journal was used as a scrapbook and printed clippings were pasted over the handwritten text. The collection includes copies of pages both before and after clippings were stripped away.

The later clippings are primarily selections from popular magazines and are characteristic of sentimental Victorian didactic verse; eulogizing lost loves, dead children or the the fallen dead of the Confederacy or reminders of the transitory nature of worldly existence. A few of the printed entries can be dated and the author is given; most, however, are from anonymous sources.

The handwritten entries in journal form are dated; many of these entries are quite brief, little more than a sentence or two about the weather, others give a slightly more detailed picture about life in Wilmington during the war. Interspersed are what appear to be brief school girl essays, copies of patriotic Confederate news articles, accounts of the depredations of barbarous Yankee invaders, sentimental verse, and what appears to be sentences written as handwriting exercises.