The pen President Dwight Eisenhower used to sign the Statehood Bill (photo courtesy Hawaiʻi DAGS)

(BIVN) – On Statehood Day, the Hawaiʻi State Archives featured two very important artifacts from the vault that memorialize the day Hawaiʻi joined the Union.

From the state Department of Accounting and General Services:

In the vault at its Hawaiʻi State Archives, it keeps the telephone used to convey news of our statehood. Hawaiʻi’s Congressional Delegate John Burns used that phone to call Speaker of the House Elmer Carvalho to tell him the statehood bill passed. It also has the pen President Dwight Eisenhower used to sign the Statehood Bill. The president gifted that pen to Governor William Quinn, the first governor when we became a state.

Display of Statehood Day artifacts (photo courtesy Hawaiʻi DAGS)

“They were gifted to the territorial governor and the senate and as a result, as the governmental archives, they came to us for preservation,” said archivist Adam Jansen in a video clip provided by DAGS. 

“For us, it’s not just the fact that these were the actual objects used to become a state. It’s the stories that go around that,” Jansen said. “That now we can use a single artifact to start talking about all of the different aspects of statehood, the lead up to it, the referendum that had to be signed, some of the opposition to it.” 

“These are all stories that we can launch into because of one physical artifact,” Jansen said. 

Hawaiʻi Admission Day was actually August 21st, 1959, but the state celebrates it on the third Friday in August. It is an official state holiday.