'Declaration' copy found at flea market comes to Seattle

Within hours of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a printer named John Dunlap manually produced 200 official copies, the modern-day equivalent of a news release.

Most were dispatched immediately by horseback throughout the 13 colonies, one arriving within days in the hands of Gen. George Washington, who read it aloud to troops in New York.

Other copies were sent overseas to England, and a few were preserved by the Continental Congress.

For years, only 24 of the 200 copies — known as the Dunlap Broadsides — were known to have survived. Then in 1989, an unsuspecting shopper purchased a beat-up picture frame for $4 at a flea market in Philadelphia, not knowing that tucked behind its canvas was what is now widely believed to be the 25th surviving Dunlap Broadside.

Tomorrow the document — now the property of television and movie producer Norman Lear, who bought it at a Sotheby's auction for $8.1 million — arrives at Seattle's Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI), where it will go on public display beginning Friday.

It's part of a traveling exhibit — The Declaration of Independence Road Trip — that for the past year has been taking the Dunlap Broadside to cities across the country in an attempt to inspire young people to take part in civics and to vote. The exhibit is free to the public.

Lear, producer of the TV series "All in The Family" and such movies as "Stand by Me" and "Fried Green Tomatoes," purchased the document with a partner, David Hayden of Silicon Valley, co-founder of the Internet search engine Magellan.

Lear had gone to Sotheby's to look at the document because he is civic-minded, said Aimee Jasculca, the road trip's associate director. He didn't intend to buy it, she said. But after seeing it, he wanted the rest of America to also have that opportunity. With Hayden, he bought the document and created the road trip.

"It's a very rare thing; it's the birth certificate of the country," said Feliks Banel, MOHAI deputy director. "It's rare that a document so powerful as the Declaration of Independence is out in front of the people."

Of the 25 surviving copies from the first printing, only a few are privately owned; most are in libraries, colleges and museums.

This particular copy has a sketchy history.

According to most published reports, it was purchased in 1989 by an unidentified Philadelphia man at an Adamstown, Pa., flea market; how it came to rest behind the canvas in a picture frame is unknown. Nor is it known where the document had been before it surfaced at the flea market.

After discovering it, the purchaser had it authenticated, and in 1991 he sold it for $2.4 million to Donald Scheer, president of an Atlanta-based art investment company, Visual Equities.

Under Scheer's ownership came a legal battle over the document's worth. When Scheer put it up for bid in 1993, Sotheby's sold it for a price he found unacceptable. He sued, and the document eventually was returned to his ownership. He held on to it until 2000, when Lear purchased it at auction.

The type of heavy printing press Dunlap used to produce it and the other copies was nicknamed the "Man Killer," according to Banel, of MOHAI. A printer had to insert each sheet into the machine and operate a large manual crank to stamp out the broadsides, one page at a time.

A similar press is on display at the University of Washington's School of Communications.

Cal Blethen: 206-464-8223 or cblethen@seattletimes.com