Third Floor: You read it here first | Maryland Gazette (HometownGlenBurnie.com)

Residents of Anne Arundel County who could read learned that delegates of the Association of United Colonies had formed something new in Philadelphia a week earlier.

The county's four-page weekly newspaper was the first in Maryland to carry the text of the founding document of the United States, sandwiching it on Page 3 between proclamations, legal notices, correspondence on military and shipping movements and descriptions of runaway slaves.

Now, for the first time you can see this slice of our history. This spring, amateur historian Arthur Kungle hunted down the issue that carried the Declaration. Amazingly, it wasn't included in the microfilm editions, the only easy way to see the history of America's oldest newspaper.

When he brought his discovery to the attention of state archivists, they gave him permission to comb their fragile two-century-old copies of the Maryland Gazette. They put his discovery on the archives Web site, www.msa.md.gov.

"We wanted to have it online by the Fourth of July," said Dr. Edward Papenfuse, state archivist.

I can't imagine a story that would equal this one, and anything like it would undoubtedly land on our Page 1. But newspapers 232 years ago were nothing like they are today.

Frederick and Samuel Green were the publishers and much of the labor force behind the Maryland Gazette. They'd taken over the business one year earlier after the death of their remarkable mother, Anne Catherine Green.

Like both her and their late father, Jonas, the Green brothers had a lock on sources of information coming into Maryland. They were not only the official record for public life in the colony, but they also ran the central post office.

If you need a reminder, the Continental Congress approved the break with England on July 2. Two days later, it voted on the Declaration's final language. Then John Hancock ordered printer John Dunlap to make up some 220 broadsides so the text could be distributed.

Copies were taken to George Washington in New York, who ordered it read to his troops. Others were sent to various committees of public safety, state conventions, 24 newspapers and of course, King George III in England. Only 25 of these broadsides remain today, one of them at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore.

Maryland, which had been slow to authorize a vote for independence, probably received its first copy by mail.

"It would have come in through the Gazette," Dr. Papenfuse said. "As soon as they got a hold of it they would have printed it."

Back then, there was no easy way to change a newspaper's layout. Making up an edition was labor intensive work that required composing heavy printing plates from lead type. It was done over the course of a week, with news and notes added as they came into the Greens' print shop.

If much was different about newspapers, though, the importance of news was the same as it is today.

The Greens must have put the declaration in available space, placing it directly under a few paragraphs of other news. Did they receive it on July 10? No one knows, but it's in a column under a letter dated "yesterday" about state militia moving north to join Washington as the British arrived in New York.

Of course, it didn't really matter whether it was Page 1 or 3. The Maryland Gazette, as a reliable source of news in the colony, was read cover to cover.

Independence also couldn't have been a complete surprise for county residents. The Sons of Liberty met in the county. There had been protests over taxes and angry colonists had burned the ship Peggy Stewart and its load of British tea two years earlier.

In May, the Maryland convention finally authorized its four-member delegation in Philadelphia to vote for a split with England. Maryland's declaration, adopted on July 6 after word arrived of a similar vote on June 28 in Williamsburg, Va., appears on the same page as the more famous one.

We here at the Maryland Gazette hope you will pause to think about your freedom on Friday as you celebrate with fireworks and parades.

Please also remember, that on July 11, 1776, it was never truer that this county read about it here first.

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Rick Hutzell is the editor of the Maryland Gazette. E-mail him at rhutzell@mdgazette.com