Copy of Constitution Found

[David Lockmiller]

Copy of United States Constitution Found
Washington Post – September 26, 2024

Farmer discovered the document on the property of the Hayes Farm in Edenton, N.C., which Samuel Johnston, a North Carolina governor and state senator in the late 1700s, was believed to have owned. The property included a plantation where enslaved people worked, according to the Society of Architectural Historians, a nonprofit that studies and conserves architecture.

To some people, the contents of a decades-old folder found in a North Carolina mansion’s filing cabinet might just look like a stack of old papers, appraiser Ken Farmer said. But when Farmer opened the folder last year, he believed he might’ve found the rarest artifact of his career.

Inside the folder he found a copy of the U.S. Constitution that was dated 1787. On the final page, Farmer inspected the signature of Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress at the time, with a magnifying glass and said it looked authentic.

Farmer wondered which copy of the Constitution it was. He saw Thomson’s signature was written with ink that bled into the fibers of the paper and then confirmed Thomson was the secretary of the Continental Congress in 1787.

The document, Farmer said, was one of the first copies of the Constitution that Congress sent to the original 13 colonies for ratification.

On a visit to the mansion in February 2023, Farmer said he inspected a folder that had been sitting in a dusty file cabinet. Inside, there was a 1776 draft of the Articles of Confederation, a 1785 ordinance defining Thomson’s duties as secretary of Congress and a 1787 foreign affairs letter. Farmer also found the Constitution copy on four sheets of 11-by-16-inch paper.

A few days later at his Charlottesville home, Farmer said he compared the document to photos of the 1787 Constitution from archival websites.
“Oh my God, this is a dead ringer,” Farmer, who has appraised items for more than four decades, recalled thinking.

Another rare copy of the Constitution that was printed for Constitutional Convention delegates sold for $43.2 million in November 2021. Seth Kaller, a historical documents expert whom Brunk Auctions hired to authenticate its copy of the Constitution, said the document on auction Saturday is rarer than the one sold three years ago.