An incredibly rare copy of a United States Constitution that was discovered in an old filing cabinet will be auctioned off this week at Asheville, North Carolina — after being delayed by devastating flooding from Hurricane Helene — in a sale that is expected to fetch millions of dollars.

The document, an official signed Ratification copy of the Constitution that was signed by the secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson, has already received a bid for $1.1 million and is expected to sell for much more — with some estimates putting its price as high as $40 million.

The auction, which was originally scheduled for September 28 and now is set for October 17, will be hosted by Brunk Auctions, which says the document is “one of only eight known surviving signed ratification copies” of the Constitution and the only one known to be held privately. 

The document was discovered in a filing cabinet at Hayes Farm, a nearly 200-acre plantation at Edenton, North Carolina when the property was being cleaned out and sold to the state, Brunk Auctions said. The property was at one point owned by the former governor of North Carolina, Samuel Johnston, who was in office between 1787 and 1789 and presided over the state’s conventions when the Constitution was being ratified.

The Wood Family, which owned the property when the Constitution copy was discovered in 2022, acquired the farm in 1865 and retained possession of it for seven generations before selling it to North Carolina for historical preservation. 

“Drafted in Philadelphia and signed by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the proposed Constitution was delivered on September 18, 1787 to the Confederation Congress that was then meeting in New York on the site that is now the Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street,” the auction house explains.

“After heated debate, on September 28 Congress resolved to send it to the states for ratification. To that end, Charles Thomson, the Secretary of Congress, ordered 100 copies of the printed archetype, only a fraction of which he signed for sending to the legislatures of the 13 original states.”

The auction’s initial scheduled date of September 28 would have marked 237 years since the copy of the Constitution was printed. Now, less than three weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated much of the area, the auction house is resuming operations and seeking a return to normalcy, as it prepares to sell what it has called one of  “the most important documents ever offered at auction.” 

“We don’t have running water, but that’s the only thing,” an auctioneer and fine arts specialist at Brunk Auctions, Nancy Zander, tells the Sun, noting that they had an auction last week that went routinely. 

In the wake of the hurricane, a lack of clean and running water has been a major issue and a top priority of government officials, after critical water supplies were contaminated with sediment, leaving tens of thousands of residents without access to running water. In North Carolina alone, there have been 94 confirmed deaths from Hurricane Helene, authorities said on Monday. 

Yet as communities seek to rebuild and come out from the aftermath of the flooding, events like the auction provide a small “bit of normal.” 

“Everybody seems to have jumped right back on the wagon,” Ms. Zander says. “I mean, clearly there’s heartbreak all around us, but it is nice to have some normal and, you know, we’re a family business, and we all feel very much like family, and so it’s very nice for all of us to be here having a bit of normal together after everything we’ve all been through.”