In Albany, New York, in 1955, someone rifling through an attic came across a bundle of documents. The importance of the documents themselves, if there was any, has been lost to the ages. But the paper used to wrap the documents turned out to be one of the most significant finds in the country’s history.
The wrapping paper was an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. In 1956, the University of Virginia purchased it for $4,000. Similar copies have sold more recently for as much as $8 million.
On Monday, Presidents Day, you can see it on display in the Rotunda.
A group of visiting medical students tours the “Declaring Independence” exhibition in the Small Special Collections Library Friday, where one of UVA’s two copies of the founding document is on permanent display. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
The copy is one of 26 known to exist. It will be on display in the Rotunda for a single day as part of the ongoing UVA250 celebration, a yearlong event to explore the people, places and events that founded a nation 250 years ago this July, and how the University was created to serve the fledgling democracy.
On July 4, 1776, some of the nation’s founding fathers took a draft of their declaration to Philadelphia printer John Dunlap. In a hurried effort, he assembled the words on his printing press and produced around 200 “broadsides,” or copies about the size of a small poster, that were dispatched across the colonies.
“It was their version of breaking news,” Holly Robertson, a University Library curator, said. “Today, it would be a tweet.”
Holly Robertson, a University Library curator, shows where document conservators made small repairs to the declaration copy UVA has on display, regarded as one of the best-preserved copies in the nation. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
“Now it would take seconds to get to our phones,” curator George Riser, of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, said. “But it took all the way to July 26 for someone to get on a horse and bring (a copy) down to Williamsburg,” when news of the declaration was first printed in Virginia.
When most people think of the Declaration of Independence, they imagine the handwritten document with the outsized John Hancock signature now in the National Archives. But that document was created and signed about a month later, in August 1776. The Dunlap broadsides were the first copies of the nation’s seminal document.
As the original 200 copies circulated, local newspapers printed their own versions. Surviving copies of those news printings are likewise rare and valuable, but the Dunlap broadsides are the historic gold standard.
