Declaration of Independence copy found in Scotland, sells for $4.46M at auction

As the nation gets ready to celebrate its 245th birthday, a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence has gone on the auction block and sold for $4.46 million.

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The document was one of 201 that were created by William Stone in 1823 and commissioned by then-Secretary of State, and eventual president, John Quincy Adams. It is one of 52 that are known to have survived, the Philadelphia Voice reported.

They were originally given to official repositories, officeholders and the surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence.

It is said that Stone took three years to create the engraving plate, which, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, is the most precise copy.

It was the last of the six signers’ copies in private hands. This copy was one of two given to Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer, who was from Carrollton, Maryland. It was then given to Carroll’s granddaughter, Emily Caton, and her husband John McTavish, who had his name added. It then went to a Scottish family and was lost to history for 177 years before being found in a home in Scotland, The Inquirer reported.

The other copy presented to Carroll is in the Maryland Center of History and Culture, the Voice reported.

The document was expected to sell for between $500,000 and $800,000 but when the hammer came down, it was sold for a whopping $4.42 million in Philadelphia by Freeman’s Auctions, which will display the document later this year, the Voice reported.

This isn’t the only piece of American history to be out on sale recently.

A pair of pistols once owned by Alexander Hamilton, that had been given to the Founding Father by his father-in-law Philip Schuyler, was auctioned off in May Forbes reported. Schuyler used the pistols during the French and Indian War. They were later inscribed with “AH” and were believed to be the pistols Hamilton carried at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. Hamilton eventually gave them to his son, who was killed in a duel before his father met the same fate across a New Jersey field from Aaron Burr. The guns were in the family’s possession until 1842, when Schuyler Hamilton III sold them to Robert Abels.

The pistols had a starting bid of $750,000 but were sold for $1.15 million by the Rock Island Auction Company.

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