Archives West Finding Aid

The foldered correspondence, which includes both incoming and outgoing letters and telegrams, was originally arranged first alphabetically, then chronologically by year only. In order to make the collection more useable the correspondence was further separated by month, but no attempt was made to put material in strict chronological order. The letterbooks of outgoing correspondence are in chronological order.

There is a second set of letterbooks labeled "Statements" which contain letterpress copies of bank statements sent to depositors; these were placed at the beginning of the second series.

The remaining bound volumes include stock certificates, Auxiliary Records, Savings Ledgers, books listing valuable papers intrusted to the bank and include the agreements between the bank and the depositor, ledgers of individual accounts, and other financial volumes necessary for record keeping.

Some volumes from the original Bank of Commerce form their own series. These were separated from the State Bank of Commerce records because of their uniform small size and paper binding.

One final volume is the 1890-1897 Town of Wallace Treasurer's Book. This item appears on the original inventory received with the papers so was retained with the collection. Another volume which appeared on the original inventory, an account book of the Wallace Press, was transferred to the Day Mines, Inc. Collection, an unprocessed manuscript group, which also contains Wallace Press Times records. (MG 310)

Several volumes have been water damaged, and the handwriting in others is fading. Many of the volumes are labeled as exhibits for either plaintiff or prosecution in the criminal investigation which followed the failure of the bank.