The most valuable Hawaiian Missionary item known today is the legendary Dawson Cover—a letter sent to New York City, franked with the only recorded use of the 2-cent Missionary stamp on cover, alongside a 5-cent Missionary and two 3-cent U.S. stamps. Its story is as extraordinary as its rarity. Around 1870, the cover was bundled with other correspondence and thrown into a factory furnace. The stack was packed so tightly that the fire choked out before it could burn the letters. One side of the Dawson Cover still shows a dark scorch mark from that near-disaster—a silent witness to how close it came to being lost forever. About 35 years later, a workman cleaning the furnace for reuse pried it open and found the forgotten bundle. Realizing the letters looked unusual, he saved them from oblivion—rescuing what would become one of philately’s greatest treasures. Over the decades, the Dawson Cover passed through several famous hands. G.H. Worthington bought it in 1905; A.H. Caspary acquired it in 1917 for $6,100; and in 1957 the Weill brothers purchased it for $25,000 on behalf of Benjamin D. Phillips. Eleven years later it left the Phillips collection for $90,000. In the 1995 Siegel auction it realized $2.09 million, and in 2013 it sold again to an American collector for $2.24 million, securing its place among the world’s most valuable philatelic artifacts. The Dawson Cover, depicted on the 2002 U.S. Souvenir Sheet (Scott 3694), may even offer physical evidence of the 1850 Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation between the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii. Under Article XV, Hawaii’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Robert Crichton Wyllie, urged San Francisco postmaster J. B. Moore on September 9, 1850, to implement the treaty’s mail-exchange provisions quickly—a move aimed at reinforcing Hawaii’s sovereignty amid concerns over French ambitions. Moore agreed later that year, and Honolulu’s first official post office opened on December 21, 1850. Not all Missionary stamp discoveries have been free of controversy. In 1920, forty-three additional examples surfaced from the family of Charles Shattuck, whose mother had exchanged letters with her childhood friend Ursula Newell Emerson, matriarch of a prominent missionary family. Acquired by collector George H. Grinnell and later sold to dealer John Klemann for $65,000, the stamps became the focus of a major legal dispute in 1922 when their authenticity was questioned. At the time, experts concluded they had been produced by photogravure.