National Treasure (2004)
The Silence Dogood Letters
From the film · 01:21:00
“I need the Silence Dogood letters. The originals.”
The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia — accessed by a child Ben quietly enlists in the cause
What we know
Fourteen letters to the New-England Courant from a fictitious widow, originally penned by a sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin in 1722
Franklin invented Mrs. Silence Dogood as a teenager: a middle-aged widow with strong opinions, slipped under the door of his older brother James's print shop. The Courant ran fourteen letters between April and October of 1722. Several Boston gentlemen wrote in offering Mrs. Dogood marriage. Franklin, twenty years old, eventually revealed himself, and then never quite stopped enjoying the joke. The reason the letters survive in original printing — and the reason Ian Howe wants them as urgently as I do — is that the Founding-era treasure-keepers used the letters as a published-but-personal key text for an Ottendorf cipher. Page, line, word. Without the letters, the triplets are gibberish. With them, the message is exact.
The Puzzle
Trinity Church cemetery, lower Manhattan. Eight stones along the path. One bears no birth date and no death date — only a name. That stone is the door.