Declaration of Independence, 1776, 1st January 1823 (facsimile on vellum)

The William J. Stone facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, printed on parchment, with Stone's imprint. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, upon discovering the fragility of the original Declaration of Independence in 1820, ordered this exact facsimile to be produced. It took Stone three years to exactly copy and engrave the handwriting on the original document. This image is the closest facsimile of the original document. As such, the Stone facsimile has become the basis for all modern facsimiles. Two hundred copies of this broadside were distributed to surviving signers of the original document (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Charles Carroll), members of the federal and state governments, and selected universities and colleges in the United States. Despite such wide distribution, only about 30 copies of this facsimile survive.