A recently acquired copy of the original incorporation paper from the town of Camden reveals that while its residents can now brag of a connection to über patriot John Hancock, the town’s most famous signatory maybe should’ve spent less time perfecting his penmanship and more on proofreading.

Camden resident Barbara Dyer, unofficial town historian, discovered after obtaining a scan of the town’s original incorporation paper that the document, signed in 1791 by then-Massachusetts Governor Hancock, approved the incorporation of “Cambden.” The town was named for Lord Camden, a British Parliament member who was sympathetic to the colonists during the Revolutionary War.

Dyer says she’s still researching whether the misspelling, which subsequently took more than a decade to correct and appears in several other documents, was accidental or is an alternate spelling for the town’s favorite Englishman.

“I’ve seen it both ways,” Dyer says. “Being that people weren’t really all that educated back then, they just went by the way things sounded.”

While Mrs. Dyer completes her investigation, the scanned document is on display in the town office in Camden — or is it Cambden?

(Published August 2003)