Completed Digitization Project: Katharine Wright Haskell Letters

We are pleased to announce the recent completion of the Katharine Wright Haskell Correspondence digitization project, providing free and open online access to more than 300 letters written by Katharine Wright Haskell, the younger sister of the Wright Brothers, between 1922 and 1926. Earlier this year, we announced the launch of the project. The online gallery in Wright State University’s institutional repository CORE Scholar includes scanned images of the original handwritten letters, as well as typed transcriptions.

Letter from December 16, 1925, partial page 1 (click on the image to view larger)

These letters illustrate her life in her later years, allowing us a glimpse of who she was as a private person. She writes of her thoughts on a variety of topics and her daily life. Among other topics and events we get insight to her life as companion and assistant to her brother Orville, her burgeoning romantic relationship with Henry, and her friendship with explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. The letters are from the Katharine Wright Haskell Papers (MS-700).

Katharine Wright, 1914
Katharine Wright, 1914

This digital project has been produced by the University Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives, through the combined efforts of its archivists, metadata librarian, and digitization specialists, who collaborated to provide the digitization, metadata encoding, and uploading of digital content to CORE Scholar.

Special Collections & Archives would also like to make a special acknowledgement to Lois E. Walker for sharing her transcriptions of these letters and to the Haskell family, who donated the letters in 2022 in honor of Dawne Dewey, the long-time head of WSUL Special Collections & Archives.

Please visit the Special Collections & Archives’ CORE Scholar page to browse additional digital collections.

If you have questions or comments about this or any of our many collections, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

This entry was posted in Collections, Local History, Wright Brothers and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.