The collection contains material relation to Caroline Bartlett Crane's personal and public life as a Unitarian minister, a social and urban reformer, suffragist, and early conservationist. Papers include personal and professional correspondence, speeches, sermons, articles,articles, travel journals, scrapbooks, biographical material, and photographs. Papers relating to women's issues of the early 20th century include: correspondence with suffragists Anna Howard Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Addams; Kalamazoo Civic Improvement League; League of Women Voters; health, visiting nurses and sanitation; divorce laws; material on women in the church and rural life in the mid-1920s. Material on social reform issues includes: prison and poorhouse investigations and reform; juvenile delinquency; legislative reform of meat inspection; municipal sanitary surveys; the Salvation Army in England; Old Age Security; unemployment. Materials on housing in the 1920s includes: Crane's book Everyman's House, with photographs and design plans for the house, which was a winner of Herbert Hoover's "Better Homes of America" campaign. Anti-war and World War I materials include: the papers of the Women's Committee Coucil of National Defense (Michigan Division); Henry Ford's Peace Ship; disarmament; preparedness; League of Nations; posters. Forestry and conservation interests include; state park status for Rowe's Island in the Kalamazoo River between Comstock and Galesburg; U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletins; American Forestry Association reprints; 1920s tourist guides of Michigan parks and campgrounds.

The papers of Dr. Augustus Warren Crane include: correspondence; patents relating to vaccines; golf and automobiles; articles and writings relating to the medical profession and X-rays; Constitution and by-laws of the American Roentgen Ray Society. Seven of the boxes in the collection contain the papers of Dr. A.W. Crane.