Since then, Dr. Marsh; the Clarke County Historical Association; archivists at Anderson House, Headquarters for the Society of the Cincinnati; and student scholars at Patrick Henry College; the College of William & Mary, and Shenandoah University have helped to interpret Capt. Newman’s hand-written work and the signed affidavits of his fellow Riflemen. With their assistance we have discerned the following:

1. The lead-clad chest was completely intact and its contents, in good condition, are as described in Lieutenant Colonel Nathanael Newman’s letter dated 25 August 1814.

2. Lieutenant Colonel Nathanael Newman, the author of the letter, was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. According to family records, he was born in Winchester, VA on 7 August 1758, and is listed on the muster rolls of those who served with Daniel Morgan in the Revolution and afterward. He was left-handed and I am directly descended from his youngest son, Peter.

3. Early on 26 August 1814, five days after he apparently deposited the lead-sealed container in the “cairn” at the foot of the overlook at Snickers Gap, Lieutenant Colonel Newman, leading a contingent of Virginia Riflemen, was ferried across the Potomac from Mount Vernon to the Maryland shore to help defend Fort Warburton, now known as Fort Washington.

4. That night, Lieutenant Colonel Newman was severely wounded in the head by shrapnel from British guns or rockets during Royal Navy Commodore James Gordon’s bombardment of the Fort. The following day, after the well-documented, cowardly surrender of the bastion by Maryland Militia Capt. Samuel Dyson, the Virginians who were killed and wounded in the attack were conveyed by British seamen to the western shore of the Potomac at Mount Vernon. Those unscathed were taken prisoner by the British invasion fleet.

5. On 29 August 1814, the unconscious Lieutenant Colonel Newman was loaded on a wagon for transport to Winchester. He never fully regained consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time. He died at his home in Winchester, VA on 8 January 1815—never knowing of the Christmas Eve Treaty at Ghent, ending what he called the “third British Invasion of our shores”—or Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the “Redcoats” that day at New Orleans; and unwitting that his sons never recovered the lead chest he had carefully hidden in “the cairn beneath Washington’s Lookout atop Snicker’s Gap.”

6. The Official U.S. Government Documents secured by ­Jonathan Pleasonton, including the “Original Copy of the Declaration of Independence” Lieutenant Colonel Newman had sent to Leesburg with Lieutenant Binns, were recovered by State Department agents in November 1814 and returned to Washington.

7. When Nathanael Newman drew his last breath, he was not yet fifty-seven years old. Perhaps ironically, the day we discovered his lead-clad chest full of Revolutionary War documents, was the 200th anniversary of his death.