The collection consists of selected manuscripts, correspondence, letterbooks, documents, commonplace books (1763, 1793-1796), an account book (1786-1787), and legal opinions of chiefly four members of the Paterson family of New Jersey: William Paterson (Princeton Class of 1763), his son, William Bell Paterson (Princeton Class of 1801), and his twin grandsons, William and Stephen Van Rensselaer Paterson (Princeton Class of 1835). There is also some material of Paterson's father, Richard Patterson. The collection contains official documents of William Patterson the elder that relate to the Revolutionary War, the New Jersey Continental Army, and East Jersey Properties, as well as material dating from his undergraduate years at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). There are college essays, debates, and orations delivered at the Princeton Cliosophic Society, post-college political essays by William Bell Paterson, some of which were published in the Guardian (1808-1809) and the Palladium of Liberty, and poems by William and Stephen Van Rensselaer Paterson including the autograph manuscript of their Poems of Twin Graduates of the College of New Jersey (1882).

Among the papers of William Paterson (grandson) are twenty letters (1837-1846) addressed to him and his sister Cornelia Bell by their friend Anthony Walton White Evans. In these letters, mailed from Syracuse, N.Y., while Evans was working as an engineer on the Erie Canal, he writes about his life in northern New York State and the Onondaga Indian Tribes, among other details.