Revolutionary War documents displayed at Crystal Bridges

Thursday, June 28, 2012

The display opens to the public at 11 a.m. Saturday. There is a members' preview 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Saturday. The exhibition is free and does not require timed tickets.

Long before the days of 24-hour cable news networks and Twitter, America’s founding fathers needed a way to get the word out that a radical document known as the Declaration of Independence had been drafted.

So, some two weeks before Congress ordered up a final parchment copy of the document, a young printer with a high-tech method stepped in.

John Dunlap, 29, used his Dunlap Broadside printing technology to inexpensively create 200 typeset copies on the night of July 4, 1776, filling a rush order to be shipped to the ratifying states and the public.

Today, the whereabouts of only 25 or 26 of these copies are known, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has obtained one of them on loan for a display of Revolutionary War era documents.

“You could tell it was printed in haste,” said David Houston, the museum’s curatorial director, said of the copy on display during a media preview Thursday, noting that it contains misspellings and letters typeset backward or upside-down that were later corrected for the final parchment version with its cursive writing and rows of signatures.