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The Sixto Campano Collection contains 1,076 pieces of original American sheet music dating from 1848 to 1974, with almost 900 titles published before 1924. The bulk of the collection contains pre- and post-Civil War minstrel pieces, commomnly known as "plantation melodies", as well as ragtime, vaudeville, blues, and jazz pieces. Noted composers and songwriters include W.C. Handy, Scott Joplin, John Rosamond Johnson, Bob Cole and Bert Williams. Images, illustrations and photographs demonstrate 19th and early 20th century attitudes towards African Americans and include Gene Buck, Walter Dittmar and the Starmer Brothers.

This collection consists of ten Smith family letters, thirty-three receipted invoices, one bill for tuition, and one diary, all dating between 1782-1864. The letters were chiefly among members of the Smith family and confined to family subjects, but several have educational value in that they represent the thinking of that period, the closeness of family, their religious nature, and in one case a letter by a young lady who moved from Rhode Island to Savannah, Georgia, writes back to her family in Rhode Island and tells of her impressions of the South. One very religious letter by James W. Smith of Thomasville, Georgia, dated 1864, to his uncle, Mr. Remington Smith of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, acknowledges a letter to his father which arrived a week before "his demise."