This collection contains research notes, correspondence, clippings, histories, photographs, receipts, deeds, and research notes on the topics of Brainerd Mission and the Cherokee Indians that were created or collected by Penelope Johnson Allen primarily from 1933 to 1976. The collection also documents the historian's work with the Daughters of the American Revolution to preserve the cemetery at Brainerd Mission in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

This collection includes correspondence, financial records, scrapbooks, and other personal papers as well as manuscripts and drafts of books, articles, and poetry authored by Robert Sparks Walker, a Chattanooga naturalist, writer, poet, and local historian dating from 1896 to 1962. Highlights of this collection include the manuscript and dummies for Walker's Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Torchlights to the Cherokees: The Brainerd Mission.