The Counting House No. 1 — Before the storm
The Discovery
What I Found in a Frame I Bought in 1998
Before the Storm — Post 1 of 5
I am a retired database administrator. I spent my career managing information systems, not archives. I am not a historian. I have no graduate degree in colonial American history, no institutional affiliation, no office hours. What I have is a framed document I bought at a collectors fair in New Jersey in the summer of 1998, a stubborn habit of asking questions, and access to tools that didn’t exist when I bought it.
This is the story of what that document turned out to be.
The Purchase
The Heritage Collectors Society was operating out of Doylestown, Pennsylvania in those years — the kind of outfit that dealt in autographs, historical documents, first editions, and the miscellany of American history that surfaces at estate sales and collectors markets. On August 17, 1998, I bought a framed piece from them. The certificate of authenticity that came with it identified one signature: John Hancock. President of the Continental Congress. The man with the famous handwriting. Registration number 4806 H.
I knew enough to know that Hancock signatures were collectible. I didn’t know much beyond that. The frame was professional — museum glass, a descriptive placard about Hancock’s role in the Revolution, a first day cover stamp set depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence arranged beneath the document itself. It looked good on a wall. I hung it up and went back to my life.
For twenty-eight years, it hung there.
The Question
I retired. I had time. I started looking at the document more carefully — not the Hancock signature, which I had always known was there, but everything else on it. The handwriting I had never really examined. The names I had never really read.
The document is a sight draft — an eighteenth-century bill of exchange, the kind of instrument that made transatlantic commerce possible when coin was scarce and paper credit was everything. Dated August 27, 1765. Issued by a London banking house called Freame, Barclay, and Freame at 54 Lombard Street. Payable to a man named Jonathan Sayward of York, Maine. For the sum of £41.8 Sterling.
Document number 106.
Three signatures. Not one.
I had been looking at a Hancock signature for twenty-eight years. I had barely noticed the other two.
The First Name: Jonathan Sayward
I started with Sayward because his name appeared on the face of the document — the front, not the back where Hancock’s endorsement sat. Who was Jonathan Sayward of York, Maine?
The answer came quickly, and it was not what I expected.
Jonathan Sayward (1713–1797) was one of the most prosperous and well-documented merchants in colonial New England. He owned ships. He traded timber, lumber, and general cargo along the Atlantic seaboard, into the West Indies, and up to Halifax. He served as a justice of the Court of Common Pleas, as a representative to the Massachusetts General Court, as town clerk. He had earned £2,000 in interest income in a single year — 1762 — from mortgages and notes alone. He was, in the language of his era, a man of weight.
He was also, as history judged him, on the wrong side.
When the American Revolution came, Sayward didn’t join it. He believed, with a premonitory conviction his neighbors refused to share, that confrontation with Parliament would bring ruin. By 1768 he was voting to rescind the Massachusetts Circular Letter — the colonial protest against British taxation — and Paul Revere was putting him in a political cartoon depicting him being driven into Hell by the devil. By 1775 he had lost his offices, been mobbed in the streets, had his ships seized, and lost his wife.
His home — the Sayward-Wheeler House in York Harbor, Maine — is preserved today by Historic New England as one of the best-surviving colonial interiors in the country. His personal diaries, forty volumes covering 1760 through 1799, are held by the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The American Antiquarian Society’s own finding aid for the Sayward papers notes that he “corresponded with and entertained numerous notable public men including Thomas Hutchinson and John Hancock.”
John Hancock. The same man whose endorsement appears on the back of the document in my frame.
I had physical evidence of a documented historical relationship sitting on my wall.
The Second Name: John Freame
Sayward I had found with a web search. Freame took a little more digging — and the answer was considerably more astonishing.
The banking house on the document — Freame, Barclay, and Freame, 54 Lombard Street, London — was the direct predecessor institution to Barclays Bank. One of the largest financial institutions in the world. Still operating today with over a trillion dollars in assets.
The original partnership had been founded in 1690 by John Freame and Thomas Gould as a Quaker goldsmith-banking operation on Lombard Street. The Barclays name entered in 1736 when James Barclay — who had married Freame’s daughter — became a partner. By 1759, a younger John Freame (1730–1770), son of the founder’s successor, joined the firm, creating the three-name style that appears on my document: Freame, Barclay, and Freame.
The signature on my document is almost certainly that of John Freame (1730–1770) — an active managing partner of the firm that became Barclays Bank, signing a transatlantic payment draft to a colonial American merchant, in 1765.
Barclays Bank formally traces its institutional origins to the 1690 founding of that partnership. The man who signed my document was the grandson of the original founder’s partner, working at the same address on the same street, six years before his own death would leave the Barclay family as the dominant interest in the firm.
What I Had
I sat with this for a while.
In my frame, behind museum glass, was a financial instrument bearing three signatures. One was the most famous patriot signature in American history. One was a documented colonial Loyalist whose diaries are held by one of the most important archives in New England. One was an active partner in the London banking house that became Barclays Bank.
All three men are individually documented in major institutional collections. All three were connected to each other — Hancock and Sayward through documented commercial dealings, Sayward and Freame through the banking relationship this document represents, Freame and Hancock through the colonial financial system they both inhabited.
The document was dated August 27, 1765 — four months before the Stamp Act took effect, imposing the first direct British tax on precisely this class of commercial instrument. Sayward’s own diary records the consequences: his sloop Cynthia, unable to clear for Halifax “by reason of the Stamp Act.”
It was not a Hancock autograph piece. It was a primary source document of transatlantic commerce at the precise moment that commerce began to fracture into revolution.
I had been looking at it for twenty-eight years.
What Comes Next
I submitted the document to James Spence Authentication in Parsippany, New Jersey for a formal Letter of Authenticity covering all three signatures. I contacted the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester about the Sayward diaries. I reached out to the Barclays Group Archives in Manchester, England about Freame family handwriting exemplars. I began writing an academic paper — with some help I’ll discuss in a later post — for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.
And then the American Antiquarian Society sent me photographs of the August 1765 diary pages.
That is the subject of Post 3.
Paul G. Molé is a retired database administrator and independent scholar from Stillwater, New Jersey. He is the owner of the 1765 sight draft described in this series and the author of “Before the Storm: Commerce, Credit, and the Coming Revolution in a Triple-Signed Transatlantic Sight Draft of 1765,” submitted for peer review in February 2026.
Very cool!