Did you know these facts about the Constitution

Did you know these facts about the Constitution

Established on November 26, 1789, the first national "Thanksgiving Day" was originally created by George Washington as a way of "giving thanks" for the Constitution.

One of the amendments in the original Bill of Rights that the states considered was a requirement that each representative in the House of Representatives only represent 50,000 people. It did not pass and that is a good thing because that would mean today that we would 5,990 representatives! Today we have 435 representatives because that is the number of chairs that will fit in the House chambers in the U.S. Capitol. So every ten years, after the census is taken, Congress divides the population by 435 and decides how many representatives each state gets.

Virginia was the most populous state when the Constitution was ratified and today it is California. Six states have only one representative. Rhode Island, which was the least populated in 1787, now has two representatives.

At 81, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania was the oldest delegate at the Constitutional Convention and at 26, Jonathon Dayton of New Jersey was the youngest.

The original Constitution is on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, it was moved to Fort Knox for safekeeping.

More than 11,000 amendments have been introduced in Congress. Thirty three have gone to the states to be ratified and twenty seven have received the necessary approval from the states to actually become amendments to the Constitution.