The Pine Creek Declaration of Independence
The American Revolutionary War started in April 1775. Men from the area volunteered to serve in the Continental Army that year. Most of the settlers in the West Branch Susquehanna River valley were for the revolution. On July 4, 1776, the Fair Play Men met on the west bank of Pine Creek near the mouth of the West Branch Susquehanna River and declared their Independence from Britain. The traditional site for the declaration was beneath the "Tiadaghton Elm" tree, which stood until the 1970s in what is now Clinton County, Pennsylvania. This was west of Pine Creek in what was clearly Native American land.
Afterwards the Fair Play Men met in their own Fort Horn (near the elm tree) and chose to send two men with the news to Philadelphia, not knowing that the Second Continental Congress had declared independence there the same day. The two messengers, Patrick Gilfillen and Michael Quigley Jr., were ambushed and robbed by Native Americans and later jailed by Loyalists, but escaped and made it to Philadelphia on July 10. They returned a short time later to bring word of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Read more about this topic: Fair Play Men
Famous quotes containing the words declaration of independence, pine, creek, declaration and/or independence:
“I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)
“Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed Aug. 1789, published Sept. 1791)
“I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital [Paris].”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)