Recreating the Paper

The paper used at the event to recreate the first printing of the Declaration of Independence is made on a mold and deckle built specifically to match the sheets supplied to John Dunlap in July 1776. A mold is a rectangular wooden frame fitted with a fine wire screen and a series of supporting wooden ribs, across which a thin slurry of pulp is drained to form a single sheet of paper; the deckle is the removable upper frame that gives the sheet its edges. Getting the geometry of the mold correct was the central challenge of the build. The wooden ribs had to be spaced with great precision so that the chain lines — the faint, regularly spaced parallel marks visible in handmade laid paper when held to the light — would fall in exactly the same positions as those in the surviving Dunlap broadsides. Equally important were the two watermarks woven into the wire screen: one indicating the size of the sheet, and a second identifying the Dutch papermaker J. Honig & Zoonen, who supplied much of the high-quality writing paper used in the American colonies. Both watermarks were reproduced down to the placement and proportions of the originals. The pulp itself is made from the same fibers as the eighteenth-century stock — linen, cotton, and hemp — so the finished sheets share not only the appearance but the feel and composition of the paper that came off Dunlap's press on the night of July 4, 1776.