The Legend of the Famous $4 Picture Frame
MAD
http://www.maineantiquedigest.com/articles/fram0900.htm
The Legend of the Famous $4 Picture Frame
by Dorothy S. Gelatt
Once upon a time, back in 1989, there was an old picture frame-beat-up, and
not famous. It got famous only after some anonymous guy said he bought it
for $4 at Renninger's in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, and hit pay dirt. Guess
what he said he found hidden inside the frame?
Experts told him it was an original Dunlap Philadelphia first printing of
the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776! And worth millions. Wasn't
that a stroke of luck! Especially since the guy lost his original $4 on the
frame. According to legend, the frame was too beat-up to use, so he threw it
out, poor fellow.
Well, sir and/or madam, back in 1989 lots of people immediately remembered
selling the $4 frame with the hidden Declaration, and their stories spread
far and wide. The $4 frame became famous. But not the frame buyer, even
though Sotheby's auctioned the Declaration and the poor guy got a whopping
$2.42 million for it.
At that price, wouldn't you think he'd at least buy everybody a round of
drinks or something? Well, he didn't. He just dematerialized and ultimately
disappeared, like the famous $4 frame.
Don't despair. The famous $4 frame may be gone, but it's not forgotten. On
June 29 Sotheby's sold that same Declaration all over again, this time for
$8.14 million on the Internet, and the legend of the famous $4 frame was
instantly reignited.
A new generation of famous $4 frame sellers has sprung up, and M.A.D. is
pleased to introduce some who have shared their adventures with us by phone,
by mail, and by E-mail.
Readers will remember that in our $8.14 million Declaration auction story
last month, we said Hugh Thomas told M.A.D. several months before the
auction that he was the dealer who made the famous $4 frame sale at
Renninger's in the 1980's. All he wants now, he said, is whatever anyone
wants to give him for his pain and suffering.
M.A.D. does not know if Mr. Thomas's pain has been eased yet, but we do know
a man who says he's the one who sold the $4 frame with the Declaration to
Thomas at Renninger's in the first place. Meet John Brautigam of West
Chester, Pennsylvania, a former antiques dealer and retired prison guard.
Brautigam's friend, William Ammon of Wilmington, Delaware, phoned M.A.D. to
alert us about Brautigam's place in $4 frame history.
"I bought the frame for two dollars at a house sale in Devon, Pennsylvania,
on a Saturday," Brautigam told us by phone. "That night I found a
Declaration of Independence inside, but my wife said it was only a copy, so
I put it back and sold the frame the next day to a man at Renninger's for
four dollars. Months later there was that story about Renninger's and the
frame, and I realized I was the one who sold it to the man who sold it at
Renninger's.
"My fingerprints must be on it," Brautigam mused. "But I have no claim. It's
my loss, their gain," he concluded philosophically.
A phone conversation with another Pennsylvanian pinpoints New Hampshire as
the origin of the famous $4 frame. "I got it on Route Sixteen outside
Conway, New Hampshire, at a yard sale," a retired dealer told us. He kept
the frame a number of years, and he said he never got an opinion on the
Declaration inside. "You'll laugh, but I sold the frame to a woman outside
the Black Angus at Adamstown for twenty-five dollars. I didn't know the
Declaration was real," he said.
An E-mail arrived from a woman who wishes to be anonymous, saying: "I hate
to say I think I know the TRUE story of its history. The only thing true
about the story that came out is they paid $4.00 for it."
This woman claims a connection not with the famous $4 frame but with the
Declaration. Her story is that at an auction she bought a $1 mixed box lot
that included a brown leather document purse with assorted family papers.
"In the pouch," she writes, "was what I believe to be this [Declaration]
copy that everyone talks about and it really makes me sick to think about
it...I folded the bottom up so it would fit into the frame...[and] put it in
a small black frame and took it back to the auction I had bought it at...I
have always felt this [the Declaration auctioned at Sotheby's] was the copy
I sold [for $4]...I really think they should be able to check for a sign
that it really did spend most of its life in this pouch...I'm not sure if I
have the pouch or not."
"Also in the purse," she reports, "were papers belonging to a Graham family
from Pennsylvania...I do have some of the other papers. I thought the
presidential signatures on these were my treasures-turned out only one was
real-others by clerks or secretaries...Please DO NOT give anyone my name,"
she writes. "I would hate for people to find out how stupid I was."
After a little checking, we can assure the good woman she is not stupid,
just not fully informed. Of her Declaration copy she states, "The paper was
uneven cut...date and such was in pencil on an outside fold area." Sotheby's
details its $8.14 million copy as "virtually untrimmed, endorsed in ink in
lower right corner of the verso...." Not the same at all, and neither were
the folds described by each. So cheer up, good woman. You didn't lose a
nickel, and you gained one genuine presidential signature.
By our deadline, M.A.D. had already received several opinions from readers
suggesting skulduggery of one sort or another.
A letter mailed to us from western Pennsylvania presented a little story
called "a fantasy" in which a museum volunteer pilfered the Dunlap
Declaration from a box of old letters and papers donated to the museum by a
woman. After the woman's death two years later, the volunteer bought an old
frame at Renninger's and cooked up the story of the Declaration hidden in
the $4 frame. This fantasy concludes: "At millions of dollars later history
was made. A thief is rich. A woman is dead. A museum is out of luck. And
everyone knows the truth and cannot prove it." Take it from there, Sherlock
Holmes!
An E-mail from another concerned reader states: "From the get go, when I
first read about the art frame discovery, I suspected that it was the State
of Pennsylvania's copy, which had been reported in the Phila. Inquirer about
a year or so before the `discovery' as missing or misplaced, and has never
been found to date. My belief is that the art frame story was the method of
laundering stolen goods."
Pronto we phoned the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, and put the question to archivist Linda Ries.
"I think he means the Bill of Rights, not the Declaration of Independence,"
Ries said immediately. "Each state was originally supposed to get a copy of
the Bill of Rights, but we are not sure if Pennsylvania actually did. The
archives was not created until 1903, so if we ever did have a copy it was
lost before that. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, and when its two
hundredth anniversary was celebrated there were news stories about what
might have happened to our copy. So I think that's what the man is probably
referring to.
"I do not know if the state of Pennsylvania ever had an official copy of the
Declaration of Independence. At least, I am not aware of one," Linda Ries
said, either closing or opening the subject forever.
Ries also mentioned that picture frames are a leading source of found
documents these days. "Recently we've seen about a dozen Declarations found
in picture frames, but they were all replicas," she said.
Does the Pennsylvania State Archives have anything actually found in an old
picture frame, we wondered.
"No," Ries said politely.