Man Hides Historic $1.7K Goodwill Buy From Wife

If you prefer online shopping to in-person browsing, Goodwill's online store offers that option for not only its typical gently used clothing, books, and housewares, but also rarer items with heftier price tags. The nonprofit is now boasting of a "historic sale" via its site—a tattered piece of one of George Washington's tents, placed in a frame with a note explaining the fragment had been taken from a 1907 exhibit celebrating the 300th anniversary of Virginia's Jamestown. Richard "Dana" Moore was the somewhat-suspicious history buff who stumbled across the artifact in 2022 while looking through Goodwill's "historical documents" section, though he held off on bidding for weeks, reports WKRC.

"There's always something that's not real that looks to be real," Moore notes. Per CNN, however, when Moore peered more closely at the item for sale, he noticed that both the tent fragment and note had signs of aging, which spurred him to finally make a winning bid of just over $1,700. Moore still wasn't sure he'd made the right move, so he hid his win from his wife as he tried to suss out its origins. He contacted Philadelphia's Museum of the American Revolution, which already possesses Washington's sleeping and office tent. The museum was excited but wary upon receiving the fragment for examination. Sure enough, based on the weave of the fabric and the note itself, museum staff determined that the fragment was authentic.

"This one is a lot of fun because it came from an unlikely spot," museum curator Matthew Skic tells CNN. Moore has loaned the fragment—which came from a not-on-display tent now owned by the Smithsonian—to the Museum of the American Revolution for display and will get it back in early January. He still can't believe he's now the only recognized private owner of a piece of one of the first president's tents and believes it to be worth tens of thousands of dollars. "Can you imagine the information and the things that were said within that tent?" he says, per CNN. More here on the history of the tent in question. (More discoveries stories.)