Historic NY document from 1775 displayed

Five weeks after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at the battles of Lexington and Concord, scores of prominent New Yorkers put their wealth, property and lives on the line by signing a document that publicly announced their willingness to revolt against British rule.

The two-page document, signed by 100 mostly wealthy, upper-class men, is said to be one of the most important in the state's history because it was the first indication that top government leaders in England's New York colony were unified in their opposition to British policies. The document, known as the General Association, disappeared from state records in the 1800s, only to resurface in Syracuse before getting lost again and forgotten in a local historical group's archives.

Now, for the first time in more than a century, the document is back in Albany, where it's on public view in the Capitol and the Empire State Plaza.

"This was the first document where they all came together, basically, in a unified voice in the colony," said Dennis Connors, curator of history for the Onondaga Historical Society, the Syracuse-based group that owns it. "For the first time, there's a government body in New York saying, 'We're basically declaring a revolution here.' "

The document was thought to have been lost in the Capitol fire in March 1911, when hundreds of thousands of state records, many of them dating to the 17th and 18th centuries, were consumed in flames that gutted the State Library and State Museum, both then in the same building.

It turned out that someone had removed it from the library. It wound up in the collection of a Philadelphia antiques dealer whose son, George Fryer, brought it with him when he moved to Syracuse in 1889.

Signed on May 26, 1775, the General Association preceded the U.S. Declaration of Independence by more than a year.