PURCHASE, NY.- The Declaration Distributed: Westchester County’s Holt Broadside of 1776 opened at The Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase on Saturday, July 4.

The story told in The Declaration Distributed: Westchester County’s Holt Broadside of 1776 is more than the story of the Broadside. It is the story of a revolution in progress, a revolution unfinished. It is the story of the ways in which those revolutionary ideas spread through New York State by way of the Holt Broadside.

According to Tracy Fitzpatrick, director of the Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase, “The exhibition will offer visitors a rare opportunity to view this historic document. It focuses on the document, its printer, the role of printing during the Revolution, the first reader of the document in New York State who lived on the land where SUNY Purchase now stands, its whereabouts over the last 250 years, and current preservation efforts.”

The document is being displayed in a special case designed and manufactured by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), similar to cases that NIST has constructed over the years for the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which are housed in the National Archives in Washington D.C. In celebration of the extraordinary effort Westchester County has made to preserve this document, the case itself will be visible to the visiting public, a first for a NIST case.

The Holt Broadside

The Declaration of Independence set forth in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, at the Second Continental Congress is sometimes misunderstood. Often thought of as a declaration of individual rights — one’s pursuit of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”— it is actually a list of grievances against the British Crown in the pursuit of separation.

In the United States we have come to celebrate July 4th as our nation’s Independence Day, but, in fact, only twelve of the thirteen colonies adopted the Declaration on that day. New York adopted the Declaration on July 9, 1776, and immediately engaged printer and publisher John Holt (1721-1784) to typeset and print their adoption in order the spread the word.





The Holt Broadside in the collection of the Westchester County Archives is extremely rare, one of only a handful of sheets left from Holt’s print run. Today, the Holt Broadside stands as one of Westchester County’s most significant Revolutionary-era artifacts.

The Declaration Distributed: Westchester County’s Holt Broadside of 1776 will be on view July 4 –December 20, 2026 at the Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase. The exhibition is organized by Neuberger Director Tracy Fitzpatrick and made possible by Westchester County Government. Support for the project has been provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.