Kennesaw State debuts restored copy of Declaration of Independence for ‘Constitution Week’

KENNESAW, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Kennesaw State University unveiled its restored 1840s copy of the Declaration of Independence on Thursday, marking the end of a monthslong process to preserve the document.

“This document was previously folded, and it was put in a book. That’s how most of these were disseminated,” said JoyEllen Williams, KSU’s Special Collections curator.

Williams oversees KSU’s more than 10,000 documents, books and artifacts collection.

“The paper was incredibly brittle,” Williams said of the “Declaration” copy. “It was printed on a very thin paper.”

The copy of the Declaration of Independence is the lynchpin of KSU’s “Constitution Week,” where students can get their hands on documents that are hundreds of years old.

“These students can really get a chance to live like the 18th century,” Williams said.

Students lined up to check out items from the past and even got to test their own “John Hancock” against documents from the time.

“If anybody thinks that these documents are old, dusty pieces of parchment sitting in some archive somewhere, they could not be more wrong,” said Dr. Catherine Lewis, associate vice provost of Museums, Archives, Rare Books, and University Libraries.

These historic items give a glimpse of past life in a modern era when history is treated as a certainty.

“It was a grand experiment, and one we did not necessarily believe was going to succeed,” Lewis explained.

And the more that written past can stay alive, the better “We the People” are for it.

“These documents tell our story,” Lewis said.

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