An Intern Saved a Museum by Finding This Revolutionary War Treasure in the Attic

[shrike]

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/found-attic-rare-document-revolutionary-war-saved-museum-brink-financial-ruin-180957411/

A heat wave tortured the city that July. Emilie Gruchow, then an archives intern at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, had recently begun working in the historic house’s third-floor attic. When she recalled the day, she was clear that there wasn’t any air-conditioning up there, and the room temperature was averaging about 95 degrees. Her project was to re-catalog the 17th- and 18th-century manuscripts stored in the flat file cabinets. She knew that many of them were historically noteworthy and many required immediate preservation treatment (archival storage in a hot, humid attic is definitely not recommended).

One folder contained the accounts of Nicholas Roche, an 18th-century doctor who treated slaves in New York and New Jersey. It was fascinating material, and she remembered, “I was reading these papers (admittedly straying from my work a little), which were interleaved with fragments of another document. When I was done reading through the Roche papers, I returned to the fragments. They were not in order, so I started reading fragments one by one until I got to the fourth or fifth leaf, which had the opening passage on one side.”

The words, she realized, were oddly familiar. Her academic background in early American history had not betrayed her (take that, ye who discourage a liberal arts education). She continued, “I had read the final printed version of the 1775 ‘To the Inhabitants of Great Britain’ in a college class many years earlier and recognized the line ‘by these and by every other appellation.’”

That line, from an urgent plea sent to the people of Great Britain by the Second Continental Congress one year before American independence was declared, was now in front of her in manuscript form. What Gruchow had found misfiled among the doctor’s papers was a draft of a document entitled “The Twelve United Colonies, by their Delegates in Congress, to the Inhabitants of Great Britain.”

[pansypoo53219]

1. i have found some awesome things in books i get at estate sales. pictures in a thesaurus i got.

some old cards in a 1891 encyclopedia brintannica. a HAND panted early 1900's xmas card! and one had a sees seko zaire bank note. blessed be the poking around people.

[TuxedoKat]

2. Yes me too

old newspaper articles, bookmarks, etc. Earlier this year I was a thrift store with my mother and she picked up a book and two $100.00 bills fell out of it!