Miscellaneous

Did you know?

• The first official celebration of Independence Day was on July 4th, 1781, as a result of a resolution passed by the Massachusetts legislature.
• The first celebration of the Fourth of July west of the Mississippi was conducted by the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804.
• John Hancock's famous signature on the Declaration of Independence was one of only two signatures that appeared on the first printed drafts of the document. The other was that of Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress. The other signatories did not add their signatures until August 2nd, 1776, or later.
• In 1989, a Pennsylvania man bought an old painting at a flea market for $4 because he liked the frame. When he tried to remove the painting from the frame, the whole thing fell apart, revealing -- to his immense surprise -- one of the 500 copies of the Declaration of Independence from its original printing in 1776, of which only 24 are known to still exist. The document was auctioned off for $8.14 million in 2000.
• And no, the government did not write a memo twenty times the length of the Declaration of Independence for the purpose of regulating the sale of cabbage. This is a widely-circulated, but apocryphal, piece of Internet humor.

For questions or comments, please email Dolphine Oda at doda@washington.edu