Content Is King

The world of rare document collecting is a PERPETUAL PAPER CHASE featuring obsessed history buffs, treasures hidden in attics, and loads of cash.

- Michael Callahan

As such things do, the cardboard boxes sat in Michael O’Mara’s office in suburban Houston for a good decade before he lifted their lids. It was 2014; his mother had just died, and the president of Meridian Energy Group, a lean, affable executive with a mustache, decided it was time to sift through them. They had belonged to his parents, and as he was going through mounds of paper and odd ephemera, he spied it: a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

The document’s circuitous journey to the bottom of a carton in Texas was something out of a suspense novel, including a stint when it was hidden for years behind the wallpaper of a house in Virginia during the Civil War to prevent its becoming loot. O’Mara figured the fraying Declaration, stained, weathered, and torn, might be worth a few thousand dollars. Maybe.

He called a rare documents dealer, who barraged him with questions: Were there engravings on the top left and right? (No.) Were there smudges? (Uh, yes.) Take pictures, blow them up, and send them to me, the dealer said. O’Mara did. And when the dealer called back, he got the surprise of his life.

“You have an 1823 W.J. Stone version,” he said. “Only 201 were printed then. Two copies went to each president and each signer of the Declaration.” O’Mara’s was one of two made for O’Mara’s fifth-great-uncle—President James Madison. “That was when I realized it was worth more than a couple thousand dollars,” O’Mara says. “A lot more.”