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By Sandy Stubbs and Diane Polky
HALLOWELL — The public will get a chance to view Hallowell’s original copy of the Declaration of Independence on March 13 and 14 as part of the state’s bicentennial celebration.
The viewing is sponsored by Hallowell Citizens’ Initiative Committee, which has a mission to to foster the appreciation of Hallowell’s local history.
Hall-Dale Elementary School students and their parents can view it on Friday, March 13, at the school. The general public can view it from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, March 14, at Hall-Dale Elementary School, 26 Garden Lane.
The broadside, one of 11 of the original 250 copies issued in 1776, has a checkered history.
When the Declaration of Independence was first written, two separate printings were made of the document. Municipalities in the colonies were given the broadsides. Hallowell City Historian Sam Webber, in 1976 when he was curator of Fort Western, in Augusta, found evidence in 1976 that Hallowell’s copy had been sent to the fort, but then disappeared.
The broadside was supposed to be read to church congregations by ministers in Hallowell and what is now Gardiner before being returned to the fort, but apparently it wasn’t.
At the time Webber discovered the reference, he found the broadside had resurfaced in 1908, when E.T. Getchell, a Hallowell native who’d moved to Washington D.C., donated it to a museum at Hallowell’s Hubbard Free Library, according to library records.
Webber, in 1976, turned up the copy, framed, on the wall in the librarian’s office of the Hubbard Free Library. He contacted a curator at the Maine State Museum, who removed the document from the frame and determined that it was the same one that was sent to Fort Western back in 1776. In the l 990s, the Hubbard Free Library Trustees lent the city’s copy to the state for a special event, after which arrangements were made to have it stored in the Maine State Museum, where it’s been ever since.
Because the broadside is such a rare document, security measures will be provided by the Hallowell Police Department for its visit to Hall-Dale Elementary.
“I hope that a lot of the younger people come and see the real thing.” said Webber.
