1777 letter a closely watched item
OLYMPIA – Carried in white gloves under police escort, one of the most valuable items in Washington’s state archives made the short trip across the street Thursday from cold storage in a bomb shelter to a display case in the secretary of state’s office.
Once a year – on Washington’s birthday – the state hauls out a 1777 letter from Gen. George Washington for public display.
State troopers stood watch throughout the Capitol and in the secretary of state’s office, where visitors trooped in to gawk at the glass-encased document.
“All the troopers know that it’s in the building and what it looks like,” said state archivist Jerry Handfield, who wore a top hat for the occasion. Thursday would have been Washington’s 275th birthday.
Why such high security for the paper?
“Because it’s portable,” Handfield said, “and I don’t want to see it on eBay.”
The document, he said, is worth about $1.5 million.
Despite the fact that the state’s named for him, George Washington never set foot anywhere close to Washington, which didn’t become a state until more than a century after he’d penned the letter.
The letter was donated to the state in the 1970s by the National Society of Colonial Dames of America.
Renton resident Linda Loterbauer, who happened to be watching the news early Thursday morning, decided to bring her daughter and two grandkids to Olympia to see the document.
“We took them out of school today to see it,” she said. “You don’t see history every day.”
The letter was written on Nov. 8, 1777, when Washington and his troops were camped 12 miles outside Philadelphia, then held by British forces. It’s addressed to a “General Nelson,” presumably Thomas Nelson, commander of the Lower Virginia Militia.
”(T)he glorious turn which our affairs to the Northward have since taken makes a new plan and winter campaigns (if we can get our poor ragged & half-naked soldiers cloaked) indispensably necessary,” Washington wrote, referring to a key American victory at Saratoga, N.Y., over British and German troops two weeks earlier.
“I think General Howe may be forced out of Phil(adelphia) or greatly distressed in his quarters there, if we could draw a large body of troops around the City.”
“He cared about the troops. It shows,” said Jerri Honeyford, wife of Sen. Jim Honeyford, R-Sunnyside.
In the letter, Washington voiced his hope for more troops, weapons and clothing, saying that “unless the several states give their assistance, we shall be in a very unhappy situation shortly.”
He also mentioned a clash that killed or wounded 400 to 500 German troops and 18 cannons, and said that American forces were trying to defend several colonial forts.
“We, under our present circumstances, (are) doing all we can to save them,” he wrote. “The event is left to Heaven.”