Following his death, Stow's papers went to a relative. In 1854 Lyman C. Draper, the recording secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, wrote to the relative, who implied that the papers might be of interest to the Society. However, there was no follow-up by either Draper or the relative, and there is no record of the papers for the next eight decades. In 1936 a box containing the records, some old tintypes, and a gold tooth, was bought for fifty cents at a storage warehouse auction in Aberdeen, South Dakota by Delmar H. Plank, a policeman in Aberdeen. He did not open it, however, until early 1974, when he gave the papers and tintypes to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
