BAUMAN BELDEN OF THE ANS

Bauman Belden: Perhaps Overlooked but Not Forgotten

Bauman Belden is the kind of person you often encounter in the records of old institutions: the ones running the show but not necessarily the ones people remember. These are exactly the people most familiar to researchers and archivists, however. With someone like Belden—the Society's secretary from 1896 to 1916 —the institution's records are like their own personal files, with much of the correspondence, internal and external, coming to and from them. Belden served the Society at an important time, as it was transformed from a rootless and club-like 19th-century entity into a formidable 20th-century research institution and museum, with its own building, a superior research collection, professional staff, and secure scholarly footing under the leadership of the big names people do remember, Edward Newell and Archer Huntington.

Belden was 23 when he joined the ANS in 1886, and it wasn't long before he was taking an active role in its affairs. In 1891 he became chair of the Society's room committee, placing him in a position of high visibility to the Society's membership, as it put him in charge of organizing the meetings that took place in the Society's rented rooms. He would schedule speakers, prepare announcements, and help make important decisions, like whether to invite women to a particular meeting or how to appropriately acknowledge and display some books given by one of the Society's most important donors. Belden was full of ideas and eager to help implement them. When he suggested in 1892 that the Society publish the last four years of its proceedings along with the various papers read at meetings, he was put in charge of a committee to get it done. At that time he also became the Society's librarian, a position he held for five years.

Born in Brooklyn in 1862, Belden was living in Elizabeth, New Jersey, by the time he joined the ANS. A proud member of the New Jersey Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, he traced his lineage back to his namesake, his German-born great-great grandfather, Sebastian Bauman, a merchant and the last officer to leave New York when the Americans evacuated in 1776. With an appetite for US history generally, he belonged to several New York and Pennsylvania historical societies. He went to school in New Brunswick, New Jersey, as preparation to attend Rutgers but never did go to college. Instead, he said, he went into the leathery business in Newark. In 1886, the year he joined the Society, he began working at the New York Customs House. The census of 1900 has him as a government inspector. He married his wife Corinne Crittenden in 1897, and the two had a daughter, also named Corinne, who was born the following year.

We can't say for certain what brought Belden to the ANS as a young man or what his collecting interests were in 1886, though we might look for some clues in the talks he gave the following decade, which included, The Gold and Silver Coins of Annam, the Queer- Shaped Coins of Asia, and The Insignia of the Patriotic Hereditary Societies of the United States. We might also consider the gifts he gave the Society in those early years, which began in 1891 with a handful of rupees and other coins, and was followed by an eclectic assortment of US store cards, patriotic and political medals, some more modern world coins, and a couple of ancients. He continued giving in this scattershot vein until his death decades later. One of his last gifts was a few lunch tokens from a Philadelphia high school

His final donation, in 1930, was of two copies of the US mint medals that had been presented to James Ross Snowden and Robert Patterson.

Though Belden would show an interest in other areas—presenting a paper on the siege coins of Europe in 1915, for instance — increasingly his focus was on US medals and decorations. Never shy with big ideas, he was at the center of an impossibly ambitious plan announced in 1896 to collect and preserve in a form accessible to all students of medallic art, a record of all medals issued in the United States, ‘no matter how insignificant the medal, or how meager the information' concerning it which may be given. There is, however, no evidence that any such project was ever undertaken.

Some of Belden's personal papers survive in the ANS archives, including research materials for his various publications. Among them is an unpublished manuscript for a book he was working on when he died. It was the Society's curator, Howland Wood, who had suggested its topic in 1928, when he asked, Did you ever think of tackling Life-Saving medals? I have photographs of about everything and could start any one so inclined off in the right direction. Belden took to the idea with his usual gusto, approaching it as he did his other projects, shooting off letters to anyone he could think of who might provide information—city and state agencies, shipping bureaus, utility companies, historical societies. He also wrote to the US mint, which opened its records to him after the chief engraver realized that going page by page through old records would require possibly several days.

Sometimes Belden's outreach was rewarded, and his mailbox was filled with detailed descriptions of medals, biographies of award recipients, pamphlets, and newsletters. Other times he got back little more than referrals to other agencies. All Cleveland mayor John Marshall could offer was a suggestion that he write to the Carnegie Foundation, or some similar organization, which I believe is located in Pittsburgh, and which annually awards medals to those who have saved life. He was referring to the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, and Belden did write to them.

Belden also found medals to include in his book purely by chance. Wood happened to be reading the morning papers one day and saw that a new type of award was being presented by the American Bureau of Shipping, a valor medal given for heroism at sea, and he suggested that Belden write for a specimen. Belden did, and he received a copy of the medal for the ANS cabinet.

For more information on the ANS, see:
https://numismatics.org/

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