The American colonies were a time bomb in the 1770s. Strife was everywhere, and revolution was in the air. In the years following the French and Indian War, the British government had passed several acts taxing the colonists, without proper representation in Parliament. In 1773, the Boston Tea Party took the colonists past the point of no return.
The First Continental Congress met between September 5 and October 26, 1775, to discuss the policies needed to deal with the abuses of the British government. Several states were also holding conventions during these years. In Maryland, the Annapolis Convention met as an organized group of representatives from various counties. They resolved to support Boston in her cause against the British and send supplies, and to elect representatives to send to the Continental Congress.
Times were very uncertain. The idea of independence from the British Crown had not yet been formally discussed, and many individuals wished to mend relations with the Crown while securing their rights as British citizens in the American colonies. But the hint of separation was ever present.
Leading up to the Second Continental Congress that met on May 10, 1775, the citizens of Harford County, Maryland elected a committee to decide their actions in the ongoing conflict. At Bush Tavern, in Harfordtown, Maryland, thirty-four men signed their names to a document stating that “We the committee of Harford County, having most seriously and maturely considered the Resolves and Association of the Continental Congress, and the Resolves of the Provincial Convention, do most heartily approve of the same, and as we esteem ourselves in a more particular manner, entrusted by our constituents to see them carried into execution, we do most solemnly pledge ourselves to each other, and to our Country, and engage ourselves by every tie held sacred among mankind to perform the same at the risqué of our lives and fortunes.”
A little over a year later, in July of 1776, the Second Continental Congress would vote to separate from the kingdom of Great Britain and on July 4, 1776, The Unites States of America was born – though not without a long and bloody fight that lasted until 1781.
In Bancroft’s “History of the United States” (a 10-volume series of books detailing the discovery, establishment and early history of the Unites State of America written and published first in 1834 and revised with additions throughout most of the mid-19th century), a Captain Charles Anderson of the Maryland Line is mentioned as being a companion of Washington when he crossed the Delaware before the Battle of Trenton in 1776. This Captain Anderson is believed to have been the same Charles Anderson who signed the Bush Declaration in 1775.
Charles, near the end of the war would eventually settle in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where he patented a large tract of land in Cumberland Township on July 13, 1780. He was received in Baptism at the Goshen Baptist Church in Garards Fort (now known as the Corbly Memorial Baptist Church) on May 26, 1787. Many of Charles’s children would come with him to the land he acquired in Cumberland Township. There they could, by right of settlement, establish large farms of their own on vacant lands, an option that did not exist for them in the more heavily populated Harford County.
Charles would become a prominent and wealthy citizen of Greene County in the pioneer days, having amassed wealth in Maryland, and bringing it with him to the wilderness of Greene County. His name appears frequently in transactions in the late 18th century Muddy Creek Store ledger.
Charles spent the remainder of his life operating a mill on his farm in Cumberland Township, having retired to the quite reveries of a country farmer. He died sometime in early 1824 and his will was probated in August of that year. He was buried in a small family cemetery alongside his wife Mary, who had passed sometime after 1811.
Many descendants of Charles still live in this area today, and census records beginning in 1800 show the family increasing in numbers every generation, although some descendants went west during westward expansion in the 19th century, and some spread into neighboring West Virginia.
Few, however, realize the impact this long unknown patriot had, and the role he played in the establishment of this nation.