The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a 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:
Cumberland is a quiet county seat like many in rural Virginia, centered around a historic court house, old jail, clerk’s office, Civil War obelisk, and an official silver-and-black state historic marker. Another marker, differing in design, proclaims the “First Call for Independence.”
“Near this place from the porch of Effingham Tavern on 22 April 1776, Carter Henry Harrison… read the resolutions of Cumberland County to citizens gathered there. These resolutions called for the colonies to ‘abjure any allegiance to His Brittanick Majesty and bid him a goodnight forever.’ The freeholders approved these resolutions, and Harrison was instructed ‘positively to declare for an independency’ at the Virginia Convention. On this historic occasion Cumberland made the first call by a governmental body for independence from Great Britain. Donated by the Cumberland Ruritan Club January 2011.”
At the risk of stirring a minor controversy with our neighbors in the Tar Heel State, Cardinal News looked into Cumberland’s claim.
The heady tea of revolution had been brewing for several years before boiling over in the summer of 1776, when, on July 4, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted the Declaration of Independence.
Two months earlier, on May 15, the Fifth Virginia Convention, meeting in Williamsburg, voted unanimously to instruct Virginia’s representatives in Congress to introduce a motion for independence.
A number of county delegates at the Fifth Convention, which began May 6, had been instructed to call for independence. Cumberland’s instructions beat Charlotte County’s by one day. Cumberland’s claim is based on records from a meeting of Cumberland’s Committee of Safety on April 22.
The resolutions were penned by committee member Carter Henry Harrison I. Among the First Families of Virginia — not first at Jamestown, but foremost among the Colonial aristocrats — Carter Henry Harrison I (1736–1793) was as blue-blooded as any, with ancestors among the Harrisons, Burwells and Carters, including the lordly “King” Carter of Corotoman. A link in a gold-plated genealogical chain, Harrison I promulgated a long line of Carter Henry Harrisons, including Carter Henry Harrison III and Carter Henry Harrison IV, both mayors of Chicago. IV’s son, V, died in 1964. The ancestral home of all these Carter Henry Harrisons, Clifton, still stands near Cartersville in Cumberland County.
In 2003, Michael Willis, superintendent of Cumberland County Public Schools, commissioned Jeremiah D. Heaton, director of Cumberland County Office on Youth, to research Cumberland’s claim and verify whether Cumberland was in fact “the first governmental body to openly and publicly call for independence from Great Britain.”
Heaton compared Cumberland’s resolutions with the Halifax Resolves, passed by the North Carolina Provincial Congress, meeting in Halifax, N.C., on April 12, 1776. That body “Resolved that the delegates for this Colony in the Continental Congress be impowered to concur with the other delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency…” NCpedia, official online encyclopedia of North Carolina, claims this document as “the first official action calling for independence.”
Heaton did not agree. “Although North Carolina’s Halifax Resolves antedates Cumberland’s declaration by 10 days,” he concluded, “it is not absolute.” North Carolina told her delegates to concur with other Colonies, whereas Cumberland’s men were exhorted to positively declare for independence.
Jeremiah D. Heaton was elected to Cumberland’s board of supervisors in 2003, and lost an election to Congress from Virginia’s 9th District in 2010, running as an independent. According to his LinkedIn page, he is now the CEO of A to B Robotics in Abingdon.
In an odd tangent to this story, Heaton, in 2014, went to Africa and claimed an arid 795-square-mile tract on the Egypt-Sudan border, known locally as Bir Tawil, as the “Kingdom of North Sudan,” with himself as king and his daughter, Emily, as princess. “I wanted to show my kids I will literally go to the ends of the earth to make their wishes and dreams come true,” he was quoted as saying, explaining that he picked the desolate expanse after searching the web for “terra nullius,” i.e., land unclaimed by any state. The story got worldwide media attention, but the Kingdom of North Sudan failed to win diplomatic recognition. A picture of Heaton in his royal regalia, not unlike that of His Brittanick Majesty, is here: Attempts to contact Heaton were not successful.
Betty Sears, secretary-treasurer of Cumberland County Historical Society, said the Cumberland Ruritan Club proposed a state historic marker commemorating the resolutions, but the Department of Historic Resources turned it down. DHR received the proposal in 2009, according to file notes shared by Jennifer Loux, highway marker program manager.
“Marker staff advised sponsors that the text as written was a repeat and expansion of a topic already covered by the ‘Clifton’ (marker JE-36) state highway marker produced in 1947, and advised that production of a private marker would be the best alternative.” DHR staff reviewed the text for the private marker and found it to be accurate, according to the file notes.
In fact, the state’s endorsement of the claim, as displayed on the Clifton sign, is lukewarm at best. The original 1947 text said “Apparently this was the first of such declarations publicly approved.” Revised in 2017, it now says Cumberland’s were “among the earliest such instructions approved by a public body in Virginia.”
So who came first, Cumberland or North Carolina? As Heaton pointed out, if you ask who was first to positively declare for independence, rather than merely concur with other bodies, then Cumberland has a strong claim. As the state of a quantum particle depends on how you measure it, the answer to this question of revolutionary primacy depends on how you ask it.
