A Founding Find

The Marriott Library has found a copy of the Declaration of Independence that’s easier to read than the original—a facsimile copied directly from the founding document and now among the earliest versions available.

Its pedigree runs straight back to the original. In 1820, John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, commissioned Washington, D.C., engraver William J. Stone to reproduce the handwritten Declaration. Stone spent three years engraving a copperplate from the original and sold it to the State Department in 1823. Two hundred prints were struck on parchment and sent to official institutions and the Declaration’s surviving signers.

Decades later, Stone’s friend and colleague Peter Force was assembling American Archives, a collection of transcribed manuscripts on the history of the American colonies. He commissioned Stone to pull fresh prints from that same plate, and the Declaration was folded into the Fifth Series, Volume 1, published in 1848—the copy now in the library’s hands.

“We were absolutely thrilled when we discovered this treasure,” says Todd Samuelson, associate dean for Special Collections. “Since it was created using an immediate transfer from the original Declaration, it is more legible than the original.”

The facsimile is on display in “America in the Archives: The Many Voices of Democracy,” an exhibition on the fourth floor of the Marriott Library that traces the nation’s story through its records. It runs through November 29, 2026.