How a now-defunct county in Southwest Virginia became the first to declare its willingness to fight Britain

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:

The Fincastle Resolutions helped pave the way for the Declaration of Independence.

The signers pledged their lives for freedom — and one gave his.

The first thing to know about the Fincastle Resolutions is that they had nothing to do with Fincastle, the town in Botetourt County.

The second thing is that they weren’t technically resolutions.

The third thing is they probably weren’t adopted at the Wythe County lead mines, contrary to a historic marker.

The fourth thing is that the 15 “signers” may not have actually signed it.

The fifth thing is that the original copy is lost.

With so many question marks around it, what positive knowledge do we have about this revolutionary proclamation, adopted 250 years ago this month? 

The authoritative study of the Fincastle Resolutions was published in 2010 by Jim Glanville, a Virginia Tech chemistry professor who, after putting away his test tubes and beakers, embarked on a second career as a historian. Glanville died in 2019.

The Fincastle Resolutions were adopted in present-day Wythe County on Jan. 20, 1775, by a 15-man committee of frontier leaders from what was then Fincastle County. They met in response to a call on May 31, 1774, from an “association” of Burgesses meeting extralegally, for local leaders to collect the “sense of their respective Counties.” The Fincastle meeting was given extra urgency by a further call in October 1774, from the First Continental Congress, for the formation of county committees to carry out the recommendations of Congress. The men of Fincastle County, as well as those of Augusta, Botetourt and Pittsylvania counties, were late responding because many had been fighting Native Americans in Lord Dunmore’s War, which ended in the fall of 1774.

The Fincastle statement was addressed to Virginia delegates who attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia — Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison and Edmund Pendleton. The writers apologize for their lateness, assert their “love” for King George III, and lament the “barbarities and depredations” they have suffered at the hands of “nations of savages.” They allude to the “unlimited and unconstitutional power” of the “venal British parliament,” which attempted “to strip us of that liberty and property with which God, nature, and the rights of humanity, have vested us.” 

Specifically, they invoke the “civil and religious rights and liberties of British subjects, as settled at the glorious Revolution.” The Glorious Revolution (1688) deposed James II, replaced him with William and Mary as monarchs of England, Scotland and Ireland, and confirmed Parliament as the ruling power in the kingdom. Parliament, in the view of the Fincastle men, had failed disastrously in its duty to protect their liberties.

The political history of Great Britain can be seen as a process by which the monarch gradually lost power and the people gradually gained it, with the Magna Carta (1215) and Glorious Revolution as important steps on the way. George III was closer to a figurehead than an autocrat. “Parliament was already writing the speeches he gave Parliament, and the real head of the government was the prime minister, a term they’d already been using for decades before 1776,” historian Woody Holton said. 

In the strongly worded conclusion, they assert their right to the “inestimable privileges” they are entitled to as British subjects and declare that they are “deliberately and resolutely determined never to surrender them to any power upon earth, but at the expense of our lives.” In these sentiments, they pledged to “live and die.”

In putting their lives on the line, the Fincastle frontiersmen upped the ante in the escalating confrontation with the mother country that would climax on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia.

Richard Osborn published a study of Fincastle signer William Preston in “Journal of Backcountry Studies.”

“A majority of those signing the resolutions who came from a Scotch-Irish background were reminded of their roots in Ireland and their earlier ancestry in Scotland where they felt the English had abused their liberties,” Osborn wrote. 

The policies that vexed them most had to do with land. Nothing was more important to Scotch-Irish frontiersmen, many of whom had come to the New World in search of it.

The royal Proclamation of 1763 had set aside land west of the Eastern Continental Divide for the Native Americans, but enforcement had been sketchy. But by 1774, Lord Dunmore began to enforce the Proclamation “even against Seven Years’ War veteran officers who’d obtained a partial exception,” Holton said. Furthermore, the Quebec Act gave all the land northwest of the Ohio River to Quebec.

(See our previous Cardinal 250 stories on the Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act).

Forty Virginia jurisdictions held meetings in the summer of 1774 in response to the Burgesses’ call. By the winter of 1774-75, with the Continental Congress adding its summons, 19 more counties had responded, including Fincastle, Augusta, Botetourt and Pittsylvania. These four counties “produced by far the most important documents of the second wave of committee actions,” Glanville wrote. “The men of all four counties resolved that they would give their lives for American independence.”

In Virginia history, Fincastle was a gigantic, short-lived county that existed from 1772 to 1776, encompassing western Virginia, part of southern West Virginia, and all of Kentucky — land claimed by native inhabitants who were ready to defend it.

The Fincastle men wanted that land. The fight for it was brutal with atrocities on both sides. Fincastle signer William Russell’s son Henry was tortured to death near Wallens Ridge in modern-day Wise County in 1773.

Experiences like this are reflected in the wording of a recruiting circular published by signer William Preston in 1774 calling for volunteers for a savage assault against the Native Americans: “This useless People may now at last be Obliged to abandon their Country[;] Their Towns may be plundered & Burned, Their Cornfields Distroyed: & they Distressed in such a manner as will prevent them from giving us any future Trouble…”

While the Fincastle committee members can certainly be called frontiersmen, they were far from uncouth. They were well-educated, well-spoken, well-dressed men of good standing in society, according to Michael Gillman, manager of historic sites and Homestead Museum operations for Wytheville.

“As a group,” Glanville wrote, “the signers formed the political core of the region, and they served Fincastle and its predecessor and derivative counties as justices, sheriffs, delegates, elected officials, militia officers, clerks, treasurers, surveyors, and in other public positions of authority.” Four of them had family connections to Patrick Henry.

In January 1775, they gathered in present-day Wythe County, either at McGavock’s Tavern in Fort Chiswell or at the courthouse near the lead mines in southern Wythe. 

On Austinville Road near the former site of the lead mines is a marker stating: “HERE ON JANUARY 20, 1775, THE COMMITTEE OF SAFETY OF FINCASTLE COUNTY ADOPTED RESOLUTIONS BOLDLY DECLARING THEIR DETERMINATION NEVER TO SURRENDER THE RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES GRANTED TO THEM AS VIRGINIANS…”

“There is in point of fact not one documentary record of the committee ever meeting at the Lead Mines, despite hundreds of later statements to that effect,” Glanville wrote.

Gillman said: “You have men coming from modern day Pulaski, Montgomery County … Russell, Washington and Smyth County, and McGavock’s Tavern is situated on the Great Road [modern U.S. 11] at a meeting point, so why would they travel eight miles more south to the courthouse when they could just meet at McGavock’s Tavern and hold their meeting?”

Glanville, a scholar and stickler for accuracy, also disputed the term “resolutions.”

“As published, the record of the Fincastle committee is in the form of an address to Virginia’s representatives to the Continental Congress.” They never say “be it resolved that…” And while the committee members are often called “signers,” there is no proof that the Fincastle resolutions were ever actually signed. 

The actual authorship is yet another question. “Many writers have indulged themselves in speculating about who wrote the Fincastle Resolutions, but the fact is we do not know,” Glanville wrote. “They likely were not the work of a single individual. Their significance is that they reveal the collective view of many men on the frontier at an important moment in American history. “

The original copy was lost. The Fincastle Resolutions are known to history from publication in Purdie’s Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg on Feb. 10, 1775.

Several signers were directly involved in the shooting war that followed.

William Campbell commanded a Patriot militia unit, the Overmountain Men, at the decisive Battle of Kings Mountain (South Carolina) on Oct. 7, 1780. The Patriots faced a Loyalist army under a British officer — Americans fighting Americans in a civil war. One Loyalist described the Patriots as “tall, raw-boned, sinewy with long matted hair.” According to legend, Campbell told his Overmountain Men to “shout like Hell and fight like devils.” 

“William Campbell’s military role at the Battle of Kings Mountain immortalized him, and it is at least arguable that without that victory the Revolution would have failed,” Glanville wrote. Another signer, William Edmonson, also fought at Kings Mountain. 

(See our previous Cardinal 250 stories on William Campbell and the Overmountain Men, including this podcast).

Stephen Trigg paid for his boldness with his life. A Virginia native, Trigg was a merchant, justice of the peace and militia captain. He was about 33 when he served on the Fincastle committee. Later he moved to Kentucky, where he was a militia officer.

The capitulation of Cornwallis in 1781 wasn’t the end of hostilities. In August 1782, a British-Native American force invaded Kentucky. In one of the last actions of the Revolutionary War, they overwhelmed a Patriot unit at the Battle of Blue Licks. The body of Stephen Trigg was later found hacked into pieces.