The Stone Broadside

The official handwritten Declaration of Independence—the one signed in Philadelphia in 1776 and housed today at the National Archives—is now faded and mostly illegible. It had already severely deteriorated within one generation of the American Revolution. In 1820, in order to preserve the text, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams hired the Washington, DC engraver William J. Stone to create a hyper-accurate copy of the original. Stone worked on the project for three years and the engraved reproduction that he created is, to this day, the clearest and most accurate representation of what the official handwritten Declaration of Independence once looked like. Because Stone’s copy is so clear, while the original is so badly faded, almost every subsequent representation of the handwritten Declaration is actually a reproduction of Stone’s work.