An appraiser discovered the 1787 document before a house sale in North Carolina in 2022. It goes up for auction this week.
Ken Farmer, an antiques appraiser, opened a folder that had been stored for decades in a dusty file cabinet in an old mansion in North Carolina and pulled out a creased, worn sheet of paper. He could tell almost immediately that he was looking at a print dating back to the 18th or 19th century.
On that day in 2022, his excitement grew and the hairs on his arms stood up as he recognized the words at the top of the page.
“WE the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,” it read.
But it wasn’t until he looked at the bottom of the document and saw the signature of Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress at the time of the Constitutional Convention, that Mr. Farmer realized how momentous this finding could be. He believed he was holding one of the first copies made of the Constitution of the United States.
“I’ve never found anything this exciting,” Mr. Farmer said.
Two years later, experts believe that Mr. Farmer, who had been hired to appraise the value of the historic home where the document was found, had stumbled upon a rare original copy of the Constitution, and its sellers predict that it will be sold for millions at an auction later this week.
“I think it’s really neat and extraordinary a copy has been found,” said Michael J. Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an expertise in the history of the U.S. Constitution.
The document is more valuable as a historical artifact, Mr. Gerhardt said, because it is well-preserved, has Mr. Thomson’s signature on it and is a ratified version. He called it “probably the most important copy of the Constitution that would exist.”
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