Walter Sheldon, Middlebury Resident

Paymaster, Northern Army

The Walter Sheldon papers are held at the Stewart-Swift Research Center at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History. The vast majority are administrative records: pay receipts, notices of soldiers mustering out, communications with headquarters regarding pay anomalies, and other such correspondence.

Included among the papers are a few general orders for the northern army (mostly pertaining to his role as Paymaster) and a small amount of personal correspondence, generally concerned with business and financial matters.

Henry Sheldon and the Society of the War of 1812

Walter Sheldon's nephew, Henry Sheldon, would become a first-rate collector of all things Americana. He kept scrapbooks and pasted dozens upon dozens of primary sources into them, negotiated with newspapers to receive extra-run copies, and saved ephemera that most other people would consider useless trash. As a result, the Sheldon Museum possesses a remarkable collection of primary sources relating to American History.

Among Henry Sheldon's papers are a series of letters, correspondence between Sheldon and the then director of the Society of the War of 1812. Sheldon was seeking admittance to the Society based on his credentials as the nephew of a veteran, and enticed the director with stories of his resources concerning the war. He included these letters as part of one of several scrapbooks he made about the War of 1812, prefacing the scrapbooks with his own notations on Walter Sheldon and his service, and including pictures and autographs of major participants.