State recovers a long-lost letter by Washington

A rare letter from George Washington stolen 60 years ago from the state archives was rescued days before it was to go on the auction block, state officials said.

The 1783 letter was returned to Massachusetts and stored safely in a vault last week after a keen-eyed state worker spotted the document in an online notice of an upcoming auction of rare historic documents and artifacts. Now, anyone can see it by making an appointment with the state archives.

Written by General Washington on April 14, 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War, the yellow parchment requested the states settle their financial accounts with the army before the army was disbanded. Copies of the letter, believed prepared by an aide and signed by Washington, were delivered to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.

''Congress have directed that a compleat settlement and liquidation of all their Accouns shall be made," he wrote. ''. . . I consider it of the utmost importance both for the ease and quiet of the Army, as well as in point of oeconomy to the Public, that this business should be effected with all the dispatch that it is possible to give it . . ."

According to state officials, the letter was one of several stolen in the 1940s when official documents were kept at the State House and accessible to the public. Hundreds of documents still are missing from the archives, and state workers regularly search the Internet and other media looking for them, they said. The archives have since been relocated to Dorchester, where a trove of important documents are stored in a vault.

In late February, Ed Bell, a staffer for the Massachusetts Historical Commission, saw a mention of the Washington letter listed in an auction catalog published by Heritage Galleries & Auctioneers of Dallas, which calls itself ''the world's largest collectibles auctioneer."

Valued by the auction gallery at $60,000 to $80,000, the letter was among 750 items, worth an estimated $5 million, offered from the collection of Henry Luhrs, a Pennsylvania man who spent a lifetime collecting more than 10,000 autographs, manuscripts, and photographs.

The letter, described as in ''fine condition," bears a ''dark bold signature of Washington" and a ''small hole between lines on third page."

The auction was billed as ''the most important manuscript event of 2006," and contained rare autographs and books, including a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, a presidential pardon signed by John F. Kennedy, letters from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and an 18-karat gold engagement watch that Abraham Lincoln planned to give Mary Todd.

Alan Cote, the secretary of state's supervisor of public records, called the Texas gallery two days before the Feb. 21 auction and persuaded the owners to withdraw the Washington letter from the sale.

Over the next several weeks, state officials negotiated for the document's return, offering proof it had been stolen, including photos from the 1940s that had ''unique attributes that matched [the letter] perfectly, like a stain or a wrinkle," said Cote.

Once members of Luhrs's family were convinced the document belonged to Massachusetts, Cote said they agreed to return it. It was delivered by courier last week and placed back in the archives.

State officials said they have no reason to believe Luhrs was aware the document had been removed from the state archives when he bought it, and plan no legal action.

Criminal authorities never investigated the theft of the documents because they were not discovered missing until many years later, Cote said.

Luhrs's family could not be reached for comment. Tom Slater, director of Americana for the auction house, said there never was a legal determination that the letter was stolen.

Henry Luhrs bought the letter 50 years ago, probably from the Goodspeed's Book Shop in Boston, which closed in 1993, he said.

''No one conceded it was stolen," said Slater. ''There was an arrangement made whereby it would go to the state of Massachusetts and it was withdrawn."

Decades ago, historical documents were removed routinely from libraries and public agencies around the country, he said. ''There was almost no security," he said. ''You could go into the stacks of a library and find first editions and 17th-century volumes. Historical societies would allow people to go in and work with these papers unmonitored for whole days. It's a miracle anything is left."

He called the Washington letter ''important" because it was an official letter sent to five states. ''It was relevant and war-dated, a Revolutionary War piece," he said.

Andrea Estes can be reached at estes@globe.com.