Historic Signature Discovered

CHESHIRE (AP) — Historians believe they have stumbled upon what may be a 1791 receipt for legal services rendered by Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

Ron Gagliardi, the town historian and a member of the Cheshire Historical Society’s board of directors, said the five-line note bearing Sherman’s signature turned up pasted in a book of signatures found earlier this month in a file cabinet at the group’s headquarters, the Hitchcock-Phillips House, which is located along the Town Green.

“One of our volunteers, Mike Raucci, was going through stuff in the cabinet and found this in an envelope at the back of the filing cabinet,” Gagliardi said.

Raucci, who is working on copying all of the historical society’s holdings onto computer files and DVDs, said he was surprised to find a note with Sherman’s name on it. The book, he said, contained a signature from Thomas Kensett, the father of John Fredrick Kensett, a famous American painter from the 1800s and a Cheshire native.

“Sherman was the last person that I would expect would be in there,” Raucci said.

Gagliardi said that to determine whether the document and Sherman’s signature is authentic, the historical society’s board will have to determine whether it wants to hire a manuscript appraiser or someone who specializes in authenticating historical documents.

Still, Gagliardi remains convinced of the note’s authenticity.

“It’s possible, but very unlikely, that this is a forgery,” Gagliardi said. “I have a good feeling about it.”

In addition to his unique position as a signer of some this country’s most important historical documents, Sherman also was the first mayor of New Haven after it was incorporated as a city in the late 1700s, said James Campbell, library services manager for the New Haven Museum and Historical Society. Sherman is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven.

Campbell said that because of Sherman’s prominence and the fact that he was lawyer, there is no shortage of authentic documents bearing his signature. The New Haven Museum and Historical Society has in its library a statement of assets and liabilities signed by Benedict Arnold and witnessed by Sherman.

Campbell said he did not feel comfortable commenting on the authenticity of the note because he is neither a manuscript appraiser nor handwriting analyst.

Further complicating matters of determining authenticity of the document is a practice that people who lived in Sherman’s time undertook when they wanted to make copies of documents. Campbell said copies were written out in the handwriting of the time.

The signature, if authentic, would have been written two years before Sherman’s death at 72.