The heart of this collection is made up of twelve original manuscript sermons written and preached by the Rev. Pleasant Hunter Dalton (1821-1896), and five original manuscripts written by his son, Archie Carter Dalton (1853-1876).

Of the twelve surviving sermons written by Mr. Dalton in this collection, all bear notations of the places where, and when, the sermon was preached. Each bears at its head the number of the hymn or psalm appropriate to the sermon. Ranging in date from 1851 to 1894, the sermons are drawn primarily from the prophets, the gospels, and the epistles. None of the sermons are occasional, though one on the text of 2 Timothy 4:6 was preached at one funeral in 1878 and at another in 1884. A second sermon, quiet and reflective in tone, on the text of Isaiah 3:10-11, while not marked as having been preached at a funeral, would have served very well for that purpose.

The collection includes four speeches written by Archie Carter Dalton as a member of one of the debating societies at Davidson. The earliest, dated October 1874, argues in the affirmative the question, . The second speech, dated December 1874, on the question, , was not delivered on account of the Christmas holiday. The third speech, undated but written late in 1875 or early in 1876, proposes that passage of time is necessary before America produces great men of letters on a par with those of England. The fourth speech, written in April 1876, is on the subject of , and argues that each is a separate entity and should move in entirely different spheres of action. An undated composition entitled, , is on the subject of the vanity of worldly aspirations.

Miscellaneous original manuscripts in the collection include a letter dated Oct. 20, 1851, written from Lexington, N.C., by the Rev. Jesse Rankin (1802-1876), a Presbyterian educator, to U.S. Congressman Joseph Pearson Caldwell (1808-1853) of Statesville, N.C., on the subject of removal of free blacks to Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society (despite the objections of abolitionists), the planned removal of several North Carolina free black families in general, and the removal of an unnamed family from Statesville to Liberia in particular. The sense of the letter is that Rankin was acting as an agent of the American Colonization Society. Other miscellaneous papers including an 1853 appearance bond unrelated to the collection, and five undated pages of quotations and proverbs in the handwriting of the Rev. Mr. Dalton.

Dalton family history is represented in the collection by family memoranda and photocopies and typescripts from Bibles, of births, deaths, and marriages of the Dalton family from 1770 to 1895, and of the Hunter family from 1740 to 1833. There are, as well, a few twentieth-century newspaper obituaries (mostly undated) of various Dalton family members, and a fourteen page typescript genealogy of the descendants of the Rev. Pleasant H. Dalton.