He had managed the Peach Point Plantation,[1] and he is credited with amassing and preserving significant historical manuscripts related to Texas history.
From the 1830s through the American Civil War in 1863, Peach Point served as a working slave plantation growing cotton and sugar cane as the primary cash crops.
[6] As proprietor of Peach Point Plantation, Stephen Samuel Perry was responsible for agricultural planning, together with financial and legal decisions related to the business as well as the homestead and was advised by Mordello Munson.
[1] Stephen Samuel Perry maintained extensive records of communications related to the management of not only the plantation, but also land deeds, growth, and the very settlement of Texas in the 1800s.
In fact, the archives and manuscripts presented to the school were so extensive that they are officially measured as 13 feet, 9 inches in width.
Collection relates to Stephen F. Austin's land holdings, James Franklin Perry's mercantile business and other family-related business enterprises, the establishment and operation of Peach Point Plantation, and the daily concerns of paternalistic slaveholders who found it difficult to make ends meet raising cotton, corn, and sugar; to educate their children where there were no public schools; and to handle chronic health problems.
"[12] Professor of History, Light Townsend Cummins, of Austin College, the official Historian of the State of Texas at the time of this writing, points out that despite her important participation in and contributions to Texas history, there is no collection of letters archived under Emily's name; rather, the collection archived in the 1930s was titled for her husband and son, "the James F. and Stephen S. Perry Papers."