Tryon Resolves
Gaston County, Gaston County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Here in August 1775 was formulated and signed the Tryon County Declaration of Rights and Independence from the British Tyranny.
The Story
In the tense summer of 1775, as news of Lexington and Concord rippled south, the citizens of Tryon County in the western Carolina backcountry gathered to put their defiance in writing. Their resolves pledged resistance to what they called British tyranny and affirmed their rights as free people — one of a wave of local declarations that swept North Carolina that year, well before the Continental Congress declared independence. Signed here in August 1775, the Tryon Resolves joined kindred documents like the Mecklenburg and Tryon-area resolutions in giving the Revolution its grassroots voice in the Piedmont.
Why it matters
These backcountry resolves show that American independence was not handed down from Philadelphia but built up from ordinary communities willing to sign their names to rebellion a full year before 1776.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the summer of 1775, the American colonies were tipping from protest into open rebellion. Word of the fighting at Lexington and Concord that April had traveled down the seaboard and inland along the wagon roads, and it landed hard in the North Carolina backcountry — a region of small farms, Scots-Irish and German settlers, and fierce local independence.
This was Tryon County, a frontier district in the western Piedmont named, ironically, for a royal governor. Out here, far from the coastal centers of colonial power, people governed themselves through committees of safety and militia musters. Loyalty to a distant crown was thin, and the grievances that stirred Boston and Philadelphia — taxation without consent, the reach of royal authority — felt just as sharp among farmers who had already clashed with colonial government in the years before.
Into that charged atmosphere, in August 1775, the citizens here chose to put their defiance into writing. It was a full year before the Continental Congress in Philadelphia would take the same step for all thirteen colonies.
People & events
What happened here was an act of collective courage by ordinary men. The community gathered, debated, and drafted a set of resolves declaring their rights as free people and their resistance to what they plainly called British tyranny — then they signed their names to it.
Signing mattered. A signature on a document like this was not a symbolic gesture; it was a personal wager. To put your name to a declaration of independence from the crown, while the crown still ruled, was to mark yourself as a rebel should the rebellion fail. These were neighbors — farmers, militiamen, local leaders — staking their futures together.
The Tryon Resolves were part of a remarkable wave of such documents across North Carolina in 1775, as backcountry communities in the Charlotte region and beyond declared their principles ahead of Philadelphia. Each one was drafted locally, argued over locally, and signed locally — the Revolution written not from the top down but from the ground up.
Its place in the American story
We often tell the story of American independence as a single dramatic moment in July 1776, with a famous document and famous names. But the resolves signed here reveal a deeper truth: independence was building for years, in hundreds of communities, long before it was proclaimed nationally.
That backcountry origin is the point. The men who signed here had no assurance that anyone in Philadelphia would follow. They acted on conviction, expressing in their own words the same ideas — natural rights, government by consent, resistance to tyranny — that would later ring out in the Declaration of Independence.
This is the grassroots foundation of the American founding. It reminds us that the republic was not simply handed down by a congress of leaders, but claimed from below by people willing to sign their names to rebellion.
If you visit
This is a place that rewards imagination more than spectacle. Standing here in Gaston County, picture the western Carolina of 1775 — not a battlefield, but a community deciding, together, to defy an empire in writing.
Take a moment with the idea of the signatures. Every name on those resolves belonged to someone with a farm, a family, and a great deal to lose. The quiet of the spot today is a fitting contrast to the boldness of what was formulated and signed here.
It makes a natural stop on a Revolutionary-era road trip through the North Carolina Piedmont, a region dotted with monuments to the backcountry's early and outspoken embrace of the American cause. Come with a sense of how much was risked, and the modest monument reads as anything but modest.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Tryon Resolves
- · American Revolution
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Major Willian Chronicle
York County, SC
On October 7, 1780, this ground near the North Carolina line saw the Battle of Kings Mountain, a turning point in the American Revolution's southern campaign. Frontier militia known as the Overmountain Men surrounded and crushed a Loyalist force under Major Patrick Ferguson in about an hour of fierce fighting. Major William Chronicle, a young Patriot officer leading his Lincoln County men, was killed early in the assault at the spot this stone marks.
Hoover Monument
York County, SC
This monument marks the spot where, on October 7, 1930, President Herbert Hoover stood before a crowd of some 75,000 people to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Kings Mountain. That 1780 clash was a turning point of the Revolution in the South, when Patriot backwoodsmen decisively defeated a Loyalist force on the ridge nearby. A century and a half later, the sesquicentennial drew a sitting president and one of the largest gatherings the region had ever seen.
In Honor Of The Three African American Patriots
York County, SC
On October 7, 1780, the wooded ridge of Kings Mountain saw one of the Revolution's decisive Southern battles, where a force of frontier militia — the famed 'Overmountain Men' — surrounded and overwhelmed a Loyalist command in barely an hour. This memorial remembers that African Americans stood among those Patriots, naming Esias Bowman, John Broddy, and Andrew Ferguson alongside the others who fought. Their presence is a reminder that Black Americans, both free and enslaved, shared in the fighting and the risk of the War for Independence, even as the liberty they helped win was long denied to many of them.
Jane Parks McDowell Marker
Charlotte, NC
In the autumn of 1780, the Revolution's southern campaign swept into the North Carolina backcountry, and for a few tense weeks Lord Cornwallis's British army occupied Charlotte — a town so fiercely rebellious he reportedly branded it a "hornet's nest." This marker honors Jane Parks McDowell, who according to local memory rode ten hard miles to carry word to the American camp as the British pulled out of the town. Her ride belongs to that anxious moment when Patriot militia shadowed every British move through the Carolina Piedmont.