The John Hancock desk, a tale of provenance.(Discoveries)

In the spring of 1990 the phone rang just as I was entering my office at the university and I instinctively reached for it.

"I want you to come down to Aiken [South Carolina] and appraise John Hancock's desk. Come today or tomorrow. I'm eighty-two and can't wait."

We made a date, for the late Mary P. (Sister) Grew was engaging and forceful, but anyone would have been skeptical.

The desk is memorable. Smaller than most, it has substantial brass trunklike handles on either side. The case is mahogany, and oak is used as a secondary wood. The slant front and lower drawers are original; in the fitted interior the upper left-hand drawer is original, but the other three have been repaired (with sugar pine sides and bottoms that are nailed rather than dovetailed). Below the interior drawers, three vertical dividers, which originally created pigeonholes, are missing. There is a secret compartment here too, but it probably dates from a restoration of the interior drawers. The desk was refinished in the early twentieth century.

While examining it--and to soften what I knew I had to say about provenance--Mrs. Grew and I talked about eighteenth-century style and construction. "The oak-paneled back suggests it may be English," I said. "It's a good, solid example of its type; utilitarian rather than decorative; and the size and handles indicate that it was meant to be moved. But of course there's nothing to indicate it ever was owned by John Hancock."

Mrs. Grew winced and staggered as if grievously insulted, but quickly recovered. She opened the bottom drawer of the desk revealing a pile of papers, ledgers, and journals. On top was an account book that had belonged to John Hancock's brother Ebenezer Hancock (1741-1819); there were loose documents between the pages, and the first of these was a memorandum initialed "JH" and dated April 26, 1781; it was John Hancock's refusal to sign a murder warrant as governor of Massachusetts. Yellowed, fragile, brittle, the manuscripts appeared to be authentic Hancock family memorabilia. Even so, who could say when they were piled in the bottom drawer? "Keep going," Grew insisted.

There was a typed letter from an Orien Hancock (1885-1966) of Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Miss Ruth Hill, publisher, Beacon Hill District, Boston, November 19, 1933. The writer explained he was a descendant of John Hancock, and he had just read an ...