Correspondence sent to journalist and entrepreneur Henry Villard from his German relatives. Villard, born Heinrich Hilgard in 1835, in Speyer, was born into a wealthy family and first traveled to the United States in 1853. He spent his first years in the United States living with cousins who had immigrated to Illinois, but by the early 1860s was launched on a career as a journalist and business promoter. The bulk of the letters in this collection, drawn from the Henry Villard Papers held by the Houghton Library at Harvard University, were written by his sister Emma Hilgard von Xylander and other Hilgard family members.