This summer we are celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States, based on the assumption that our country was born when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. We know that this was a momentous occasion and that public readings of that document were held throughout the colonies in the next few months, primarily to encourage public support for the audacious activities of a handful of New England patriots that eventually gained support from their neighbors up and down the Atlantic seaboard. The Declaration clearly documented a major shift in philosophy, from resistance to a handful of onerous British practices to a full-fledged separation from the Empire.
In recent years we have read numerous articles and books about this event, watched television programs and Internet podcasts regarding it, and witnessed a re-enacted reading of it at the Oliver Miller Homestead. As we attempt to visualize the public readings in village squares and at military facilities in that bygone era, we wonder what was happening here in southwestern Pennsylvania at that time. It is easy to imagine Captain John Neville assembling his company of Virginians at Fort Pitt as soon as a copy of the Declaration arrived across the Allegheny Mountains and reading it verbatim to them, and to the motley group of camp followers in his audience. I wonder if he smirked when he got to the part that documents George III’s bad behavior and read “For imposing taxes on us without our assent”.
Our narrow-minded approach to history makes it easy for us to assume that Neville was a pompous, imperious gentleman who would relish this opportunity to impress his subordinates with his responsibility to advise them of this dramatic change in their status. One wonders what their reactions were and if his reading was interrupted by frequent “Huzzahs”. His company had come to Fort Pitt the previous summer when the Provisional Congress of the colony of Virginia dispatched Neville here to defend the frontier against Native Americans incited by the British army. He had moved his family and several dozen slaves here and acquired about one thousand acres of land on both sides of Chartiers Creek north of Bridgeville. They were in the process of building two plantations, Woodville and Bower Hill. One can assume Captain Neville gathered his family and nearby neighbors to his cabin at Woodville to read the Declaration together. Perhaps he invited his neighbor William Lea to participate. Major Lea had been a member of Forbes Expedition in 1758, an endeavor for which he was awarded a grant of land on the east side of Chartiers Creek, downstream from the Nevilles. Included in this grant was the site of a military outpost which Lea donated to the Anglican Church so they could construct the original St. Luke’s facility in 1790.
What about Neville’s other neighbors in the Chartiers Valley? They all appear to have been of an economic class several levels below the Nevilles. Benjamin Reno (Reneau) occupied a grant in Bridgeville south of Neville’s, roughly bounded on the west by the Washington Pike and on the south by Bank Street. When he died in 1782, his widow sold off this grant (now called “the widow’s portion) to several families – the Bells (Belltown), the Cooks (Cooks’ Hill), and Leonard Fryer (Fryers’ Hill). Absentee landlord Thomas Ramsey owned the land between Bank Street and Chartiers Creek; it is unlikely he was there that summer. The Allegheny County Warrantee Atlas reports three other close neighbors in 1784, Thomas Redman (Gould City Hill), Henry Wright (Kirwan Heights), and Daniel South (Thoms Run). We have insufficient knowledge about them to know if they were in this area in 1776.
We do know a lot about three early settlers in South Fayette. Christian Lesnett was the first to arrive after the Treaty of Fort Stanwix made settling here legal. He came in the summer of 1769 with two teenaged sons, made “tomahawk claims” for two plots along Coal Pit Run, built a cabin and cleared land for a garden, and then returned to Cumberland, Maryland, to bring back the rest of his family. When they returned the next Spring, they found the boys “hale and hearty”, showing no bad effects of spending the winter here by themselves. We know that Lesnett was a close friend of both John Neville and William Lea in later years; that relationship probably had not occurred as early as 1776. Richard Boyce and his family, including his cousin, John Fawcett, came here in 1772 and established homes in the Boyce Station/Fawcett Church Road area. We know that Boyce and Lesnett were close friends; in 1789 recently widowed Richard Boyce (55 years old) married 18-year-old Peggy Lesnett; the union produced another six children. The final family in this group is that of Nicolaus Heckman (Hickman). They came here in 1774, traded a cow to a settler leaving for “Kentucke” for a plot of land, and settled in for a life of subsistence farming. I suspect these three families would have approved of the Declaration but would be more interested in survival than in national freedom.
Another four miles upstream from Boyce Station was John Canon’s settlement. He and his family had arrived there in 1773 and claimed a small plot of land on which he eventually erected a grist mill. When the Revolution broke out, he was elected a colonel in the Washington County militia and participated in numerous campaigns against the Indians. He almost certainly was a Patriot and an enthusiastic advocate of the principles outlined in the Declaration.
In the more settled portions of the colonies the reading of the Declaration of Independence served largely to delineate the schism between Patriots and Loyalists; in the Chartiers Valley we suspect there were very few people still loyal to the Crown and that the focus of the Patriots was primarily on local security.