The fonds consists of Ann Holt's journal in 1857 while she and her father visited the United States and Canada, which the National Archives selected for reproduction from the Holt family papers because of its content relating to Canada. Ann Holt and her father sailed from Liverpool on 12 April in SS Asia for New York, arriving on 23 April 1857. They travelled through the United States by ship and train, visiting the following cities: New York, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Albany, Trenton, Boston, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, and Niagara Falls. Ann Holt was a careful observer who commented on most of the cities where she stayed. The bitterness between the northern and southern states attracted her attention in South Carolina, as did the attachment of the southerners to England. She attended public talks and sermons and recorded their messages, and compared the "humbler" classes of the United States with those of Great Britain. Social institutions that they visited such as schools, reformatories, lunatic asylums, homes for the blind or deaf, alms houses, and the like are also described in detail.
The Holts went to Niagara Falls on 13 June 1857 and stayed in its vicinity for several days (on both sides of the border). The falls receive about six or seven pages of entries in the diary. While there, she also attended a Tuscarora Indian church service and visited Lundy's Lane battlefield. A meeting with a Black woman and her ex-slave husband on the Canadian side gave rise to a discussion of the impact of the fugitive slave law in the United States. The Holts only spent about two weeks in Canada. Ann Holt described the situation and layout of Toronto and Montreal but compared her hotel in Toronto (Beards Hotel) unfavourably with those in the United States. Her hotels in Montreal (Donegana), Quebec City (Albion Hotel), and Niagara Falls (Clifton House), however, received higher grades. Steamship travel in Canada was also less refined than in the United States. The prosperity of agriculture in Ontario struck her while observing the rural landscape and conversing with local farmers. In contrast, she felt the Quebec City region had an "air of poverty", which she attributed to Catholicism, although the abundance of timber rafts on the St. Lawrence River favourably impressed her. Shipping on the St. Lawrence generally and the Plains of Abraham were also worthy of comment. The Holts returned to New York via Lake Champlain and sailed in SS Arctic, arriving home on 15 July 1857.
The journal is on microfilm reel A-1639, towards the end of the reel.
