This collection contains the papers of the Croy family of Blacksburg, Virginia, together with materials from other related families in Montgomery County--particularly the Dawson and Pepper families.

The collection includes a small selection of correspondence and greeting cards, largely addressed to either Ella Dawson Croy or her daughter Georgia, together with a few of the family's financial records (tax receipts, account statements, etc.).

The collection also contains six diaries kept by Mary Croy Pepper from 1900 to 1904. The diary entries concern day-to-day activities in Roanoke, weather conditions, family and friends, and accounts of extended trips to Washington D.C. and the Virginia coast.

Among the small set of period artifacts in the collection are a pair of spectacles, a straight razor, baby shoes and a cigar box.

Perhaps most significantly, the collection holds more than one hundred family photographs--mostly unidentified--dating from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and including a number of tintypes and cartes-de-visite. Represented in the photographs are works by a number of Southwest Virginia studio photographers, including C. A. Pugh (Blacksburg); Jewell (Christiansburg); G. N. Wertz (Abingdon); and Carbon, W. E. Eutsler, Kidd, H. V. Lineback, and W. C. Woolwine (Roanoke). Among the photos of scenery are images of Lovers' Lane on the Virginia Tech campus, P. Metzger's harness shop (in Blacksburg?) and Balanced Rock at Garden of the Gods, Colorado.

The collection also contains such disparate general materials as a handwritten poem entitled "Farewell," genealogical notes on the Dawson and Croy families, an IOOF membership certificate for Harvey Black, and a small oil painting (believed to portray the house at the corner of Roanoke and Wharton streets and possibly painted by Robert M. Dawson).