Philadelphia Document Collector to Sell Valuable Artifacts

You wouldn’t think that piles of old paper could be worth very much, but if so, you haven’t seen James Reis’ collection. Reis, aged 73, is a Philadelphia-based real estate agent who has made a hobby of collecting old documents. Among his treasures is the original deed to George Washington’s first “White House,” located in Philadelphia on Market and Sixth Street. He also holds the paperwork to the home where Thomas Jefferson first drafted the Declaration of Independence, and a farm that is now part of Valley Forge National Historical Park.

Deeds aren’t all Reis has, either. He has years’ worth of correspondence between colonial financier Robert Morris and his children. He finds his treasures mostly at local bookstores, he says. He made his first big finds when he bought an old store with years of documents stacked to the ceiling. It cost him $20,000, but he believes that the paperwork he has found is far more valuable than that.

Now Reis, who is only getting older, wants to sell off his unique collection.

“Maybe a university will want them,” Reis told Fox News. “My only wish is that [the deeds] go to a good home where their historic value can be appreciated.”

The papers definitely could have historical value, says Lee Arnold, director of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, who has not seen Reis’ collection. The right signature can make a document extremely valuable. Numerous documents also tend to have a more impressive value than just one paper, too, because they speak to both the sense of the collector, as well as the collection itself.

Reis knows that it will be hard to place a value on his collection, because the size and scope of it is unprecedented. He says that he has already been approached by academics, genealogical societies, and religious groups wanting to buy documents. He claims to have sold a single document to a Quaker congregation for over $10,000.