Hanover Resolves
East Hanover Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The earliest resolves for independence in the State. Drawn June 4, 1774, by Col. Timothy Green and eight Hanover Township patriots. They committed their cause to "Heaven and our Rifles."
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
On June 4, 1774, Col. Timothy Green and eight fellow patriots of Hanover Township drew up what the marker calls the earliest resolves for independence in Pennsylvania. Written more than two years before the Declaration, their bold pledge to commit their cause to "Heaven and our Rifles" captured the defiant mood spreading through the colonial countryside. Such local resolves gave voice to ordinary communities determined to resist British authority.
Why it matters
The Hanover Resolves show how independence was imagined in rural townships well before Philadelphia's Continental Congress made it national policy.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the spring of 1774, the American colonies were simmering. Parliament had answered colonial defiance in Boston with a set of punishing laws, and word of them spread through the countryside like a spark through dry grass. In rural townships far from the great cities, ordinary people began to talk about resistance in newly serious terms.
Hanover Township, in the Pennsylvania backcountry, was settled largely by Scots-Irish families — people with a long memory of quarrels with distant authority and little patience for it. This was a community of farmers and marksmen, not lawyers and merchants, and when they spoke of their rights they did so bluntly.
It was here, more than two years before the Declaration of Independence, that a small group of neighbors put their defiance into writing. The larger drama would unfold in Philadelphia and beyond, but the mood that made the Revolution possible was already alive in townships like this one.
People & events
On June 4, 1774, Col. Timothy Green and eight fellow patriots of Hanover Township drew up a set of resolves — a written statement of their grievances and their resolve to resist. The marker calls them the earliest such resolves for independence in the state, a bold declaration from a rural community stepping ahead of larger and more cautious voices.
What gives the Hanover Resolves their enduring force is their language. These were not the polished periods of a legislature; they were the words of frontier men who pledged to commit their cause to "Heaven and our Rifles." That phrase captures the whole temper of the place — plainspoken, devout, and ready to fight.
Documents like these were how a scattered people found a common voice. A handful of neighbors, meeting locally, put their names to a stand that their whole community could rally behind — an act of real courage at a moment when such words carried genuine risk.
Its place in the American story
We often tell the story of American independence as a story of Philadelphia — of the Continental Congress and the great document signed in 1776. But that national decision rested on a groundswell of local ones. All across the colonies, towns, counties, and committees drafted resolves declaring their grievances and their resolve, and those local statements gave the Congress its mandate.
The Hanover Resolves stand as an early example of that grassroots current. Written well before independence was national policy, they show how the idea was already being imagined and voiced in ordinary communities far from the centers of power.
That is a profoundly American pattern: change welling up from the bottom, from neighbors gathered in a township, before it is ratified at the top. The Revolution was made by people willing to commit themselves in writing long before the outcome was certain.
If you visit
This is a monument to words rather than a battlefield, so come ready to read and reflect rather than to tour ramparts. The setting is the rural Pennsylvania countryside where these farmers lived and met — the ordinary landscape that produced an extraordinary act of nerve.
As you stand at the marker, let the date sink in: this was drawn up more than two years before the Declaration of Independence. The people who signed it did not know how the story would end, and that uncertainty is exactly what makes their pledge worth honoring.
A stop here pairs naturally with the Revolutionary-era sites of the region, and it makes a fine counterpoint to the famous landmarks of Philadelphia. Visit both, and you get the whole arc — the local resolve of the countryside and the national declaration it helped make possible.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Col. Timothy Green
Related events
- · Hanover Resolves (1774)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hanover Church
East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947
Two miles north stood one of the region's pioneer Presbyterian congregations, founded in 1736 under its first pastor, Richard Sankey. Its graveyard became the resting place of the valley's earliest settlers alongside men who fought in the frontier wars and the Revolution that followed. A country churchyard like this is a layered record of the community that grew up around it.
Derry Churchyard
Derry Township, PA · est. 1948
This churchyard, the oldest pioneer burial ground in Dauphin County, holds the first generations of the region's Scots-Irish settlers. Among the graves lie the early pastors William Bertram and John Roan, alongside men who fought in the French and Indian Wars and the Revolution. One of them, Col. John Rodgers, put his name to the Hanover Resolves of 1774, an early pledge of resistance to Britain.
Paxton Riflemen
Lower Paxton Township, PA · est. 1947
When the Revolution called, a company of riflemen from Paxton Township answered. Under Captain Matthew Smith and Lieutenant Michael Simpson, they marched hundreds of miles north to join General Richard Montgomery's daring assault on Quebec on December 31, 1775. That midwinter attack — one of the war's first major campaigns — ended in bloody failure, but the sharpshooting frontiersmen of Pennsylvania had already earned a fearsome reputation.
Revolutionary War Gun Factory
Hummelstown, PA · est. 2012
When British troops seized Philadelphia in 1777, Pennsylvania's revolutionary government fled westward and needed weapons for the fight. Near Hummelstown it set up its official state gun factory, working in secret from 1777 to 1779 to turn out muskets and rifles for the Continental Army. In an age when a single skilled gunsmith might finish only a few arms a month, the concentrated production here was a small but vital arsenal for a cause perpetually short of firepower.