On the night of July 4, 1776, a Philadelphia printer named John Dunlap he was handed a draft of what is perhaps the most important document in American history and told to put it into print. He set the script overnight, printing about 200 copies of the manuscript to be read aloud at town meetings, nailed to posts, and passed from hand to hand. Some went to local printers in the colonies, who produced their own publications. One of them was Robert Lewis Fowle in Exeter, New Hampshire, whose Exeter broadside, which went to press on July 16, was one of 13 contemporary broadsides produced in July and August 1776. Of those 13 editions, only about 120 broadsides survive, with the majority now held by institutions. According to Goldin Auctions“Surviving and legible copies are so few and far between that the concept of owning one as a collector’s item is an almost impossible endeavor.”
Only 10 copies of the Exeter broadside exist today. One of them is currently the star at Goldin’s USA 250th Anniversary Historic Auction 2026which closes on July 8. Bidding has already risen to $1.2 million and there is every reason to expect that figure to rise before the auction closes. An Exeter broadside in comparable condition was sold at Christie’s earlier this year for just under $5.7 million. But the auction record for any Declaration of Independence was set at Sotheby’s in June 2000, when an original Dunlap print — famously discovered hidden behind a painting at a $4 market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania — fetched $8.1 million.
The broadside currently on block—known as the Goodspeed-Sang-Streeter copy—is one of five known July 1776 pages that do not identify a printer or place of publication, but attribution to Fowle was established in 1947, when Frederick Goff of the Library of Congress compared the text to known regional newspaper printings and confirmed a match. Printed before the official hijacked Declaration of Independence was signed on August 2, 1776, the copy passed through the hands of the Americana collector Thomas W. Streeter (1883-1965) and manuscript collector Philip David Sang (1902-1975). In 2021, it landed at Christie’s New York, where it went for $930,000; last year, sold at Sotheby’s for $2.4 million.
But who was Robert Louis Fowle? Not a patriotic rebel, per se Barbara Rimkunasco-executive director of the Exeter Historical Society, which has his printing press on display in its museum room. Rimkunas wrote in the Portsmouth Herald in 2010 that Fowle had to keep “his hidden political leaningsTo settle in Exeter, at that time a center of rebellious feeling. New Hampshire had already declared itself independent from Britain in January 1776, and “one can only imagine what was going through his mind as he set the type. As a Loyalist, or ‘Tory,’ he would have been quite uncomfortable with the idea of revolution against Great Britain.
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