The objective of this paper is to develop methodology that can recognize the Lanna handwritten character on historical documents by using character feature extraction technique. Historical documents are national treasures. Insignificant effort has been made to preserve Lanna historical documents. Other nations such as Egypt, China and Greece are investing a large effort in restoring and preserving their national historical documents. As a starting point, the focus is on using one Lanna historical document for performing experiments and verifying recognition methods available in this research area. The proposed system consists of three modules, which are image preprocessing module, feature extraction module and character recognition module. The details of each module are following: first, the input image is transformed into a suitable image for feature extraction module. Second, the proposed system extracts character features from the image. Finally, the extracted character information, which is kept in form of bit string, is calculated a similarity value for recognition result. The experiment was conducted on more than 4,000 Lanna handwritten characters by using 10-fold cross-validation classification method which is using 3,600 for training characters and 400 for testing character. The cross-validation process is repeated 10 times, with each of the 10 subsets used exactly once as the validation data. The precision of the proposed system is around 89.73 percent.