To some people, the contents of a decades-old folder found in a North Carolina mansion’s filing cabinet might just look like a stack of old papers, appraiser Ken Farmer said. But when Farmer opened the folder last year, he believed he might’ve found the rarest artifact of his career.

Inside the folder he found a copy of the U.S. Constitution that was dated 1787. On the final page, Farmer inspected the signature of Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress at the time, with a magnifying glass and said it looked authentic.

The document, Farmer said, was one of the first copies of the Constitution that Congress sent to the original 13 colonies for ratification. Farmer suggested the owners send the document to Brunk Auctions in Asheville, N.C., where the document will be auctioned Saturday.

The opening bid is $1 million, but auctioneers said they expect it to sell for millions more.

“Every time I have it in my hands, I still get goose bumps,” Andrew Brunk, president of Brunk Auctions, told The Washington Post. “This is far and away the most exciting thing that we’ve ever come upon.”

Farmer discovered the document on the property of the Hayes Farm in Edenton, N.C., which Samuel Johnston, a North Carolina governor and state senator in the late 1700s, was believed to have owned. The property included a plantation where enslaved people worked, according to the Society of Architectural Historians, a nonprofit that studies and conserves architecture.

The Johnston family gave the property to a friend, Edward Wood, in the 1800s, according to the Society of Architectural Historians. The Wood family owned the property until December 2022, when they sold it to the state of North Carolina for $6.1 million, the Chowan Herald reported. While cleaning out the house, Farmer said, the Wood family hired him to appraise 18th- and 19th-century furniture, books, maps and weapons in the house.

On a visit to the mansion in February 2023, Farmer said he inspected a folder that had been sitting in a dusty file cabinet. Inside, there was a 1776 draft of the Articles of Confederation, a 1785 ordinance defining Thomson’s duties as secretary of Congress and a 1787 foreign affairs letter. Farmer also found the Constitution copy on four sheets of 11-by-16-inch paper.

Farmer wondered which copy of the Constitution it was. He saw Thomson’s signature was written with ink that bled into the fibers of the paper and then confirmed Thomson was the secretary of the Continental Congress in 1787.

A few days later at his Charlottesville home, Farmer said he compared the document to photos of the 1787 Constitution from archival websites.

“Oh my God, this is a dead ringer,” Farmer, who has appraised items for more than four decades, recalled thinking.

The draft of the Constitution was finalized after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787. Later that month, Congress sent copies of the Constitution to the colonies for ratification along with a letter from the eventual first president, George Washington, encouraging delegates to agree to the terms. At least nine colonies needed to accept the Constitution to make it binding.

About 100 copies were printed, but only nine have been accounted for, according to Brunk Auctions. The copy being auctioned is lightly stained and folded horizontally but is in good condition, Brunk Auctions said.

New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution in June 1788. The following year, America’s founders proposed amendments in the Bill of Rights, and 10 were ratified in 1791.

Chris Edelson, an assistant government professor at American University, said old copies of the Constitution are novelties and reminders of the long process required to create and ratify America’s laws in the 18th century.

“We think this just kind of magically happened,” Edelson said. “It wasn’t a miracle. It was people; White men, some of them were slave owners, who were faced with a problem, and they confronted it creatively and courageously, and they worked out a solution.”

Another rare copy of the Constitution that was printed for Constitutional Convention delegates sold for $43.2 million in November 2021. Seth Kaller, a historical documents expert Brunk Auctions hired to authenticate its copy of the Constitution, said the document on auction Saturday is rarer than the one sold three years ago.

“The chance of another one of these being discovered is very close to zero,” Kaller said.

But Jack Rakove, an emeritus political science professor at Stanford University, questioned if the document offered anything new to our knowledge of the Constitution and its history.

“It’s just another copy,” Rakove said. “… It may or may not add something new to the historical record.”

Brunk, 56, said a few elements make the copy stand out. There are dashes next to many of the paragraphs, which he said Thomson or a North Carolina delegate might’ve marked. A column on the third page appears to read: “Adopted it must be & shall be” in faded ink, a message Brunk said might’ve been related to North Carolina refusing to ratify the Constitution until amendments were proposed.

On Saturday, the 237th anniversary of Congress’s decision to send the Constitution to the colonies, Brunk said he expects the document to sell for at least $10 million.

“A piece of paper that is so light and ephemeral can at the same time embody so much weight metaphorically,” Brunk said. “I mean, this is a cornerstone of modern democracy.”