On the night of July 4, 1776, a Philadelphia printer named John Dunlap was handed a draft of what was arguably the most important document in American history and asked to publish it. He set the printing press overnight, printing about 200 widescreen copies of the manuscript that would be read aloud at city assemblies, pinned to poles and passed from hand to hand. Some went to local printers throughout the colonies, which produced their own editions. One of these was Robert Lowest Fowle of Exeter, New Hampshire, whose Exeter Exhibition, which hit the presses on July 16, was one of 13 contemporary performances produced in July and August of 1776. Of those 13 editions, only about 120 expositions survive, with the majority now held by institutions. According to Goldin Auctions, “Surviving, legible widescreen copies are so rare that the concept of owning one as a collector’s item is an almost impossible endeavor.”
Today only 10 copies of the Exeter newspaper exist. One of them is currently the star at Goldin’s 2026 USA 250th Anniversary Historic Auctionwhich closes on July 8. Bids have already risen to $1.2 million, and there is every reason to expect that number to rise before the auction closes. An Exeter piece in similar condition was sold at a Christie’s auction 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 Dunlap’s original print — famously discovered hidden behind a $4 flea market sign in Adamstown, Pennsylvania — fetched $8.1 million.
The broadsheet currently on the die—known as the Goodspeed-Sang-Streeter copy—is one of five known July 1776 broadsheets that do not identify the printer or place of publication, but were attributed to Fowle in 1947, when Frederick Goff of the Library of Congress compared the text with known regional newspaper printings and confirmed the match. Printed before the official signing of the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776, the copy passed through the hands of the American manuscript collector Thomas W. Streeter (1883-1965) and the manuscript collector Philip David Sang (1902-1975). In 2021, it reached Christie’s in New York, where its price reached $930,000. It was sold last year at Sotheby’s for $2.4 million.
But who is Robert West Fowl? He was not a patriotic rebel, according to Barbara Rimkunas, co-executive director of the Exeter Historical Society, which displays his printing press in its museum room. Rimkunas wrote in the Portsmouth Herald in 2010 that Vowell should have kept “His political leanings are under cover“To establish himself at Exeter, which was then a center of rebellious sentiment. New Hampshire had already declared its independence from Britain in January of 1776, and “one can only imagine what he had in mind when he defined 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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