Sons of American Revolution, Gen. Thomas Sumter, Provisional Chapter

10/27/2026

George Washington began his career as a land surveyor in the Shenandoah Valley and the colonial Virginia frontier at age 16.

In March 1748, a 16-year-old Washington traveled across the Blue Ridge Mountains from his home in the Tide Water region into the Shenandoah Valley alongside George William Fairfax and lead surveyor James Genn to map lands for Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron.

He documented his rugged experiences in A Journal of My Journey Over the Mountains, noting details like sleeping on straw infested with bugs, visiting Warm Springs, and observing an Indian war dance along the South Branch.

At age 17, Washington was appointed the official county surveyor for Culpeper County, going on to complete nearly 200 surveys (primarily within Lord Fairfax’s Northern Neck Proprietary, including Frederick and the Shenandoah Valley) before transitioning to a military career.

While in the Shenandoah Valley young Washington also learned and adapted to the cultures of pioneer people of the valley who were mainly of Scots-Irish and German descent. His experience there helped him in future years in building a militia to fight the French and Indians and later to build an army to create a new nation.

The building he used during his time in Wi******er is still standing and serves today as Washington’s Headquarters Museum. A bronze sculpture of young Washington with his surveyor instruments stands in the yard.

10/25/2026

10/25/2026

Hoping to defuse the rising tensions and conflicts with the mother country, in early October 1774 the Continental Congress voted to prepare and submit a message to the king, declaring that if the Coercive Acts were repealed “the jealousies which have been occasioned by such acts and regulations of Parliament, will be removed and commerce again restored.” A committee was formed to compose the petition.

On October 25, 1774, two hundred fifty-two years ago today, the Petition to the King was presented to Congress, which promptly approved it.

After a recitation of the colonies’ grievances, the Petition declared “The apprehension of being degraded into a state of servitude, from the pre-eminent rank of English freemen, while our minds retain the strongest love of liberty, and clearly foresee the miseries preparing for us and our posterity, excites emotions in our breasts which, though we cannot describe, we should not wish to conceal. Feeling as men, and thinking as subjects, in the manner we do, silence would be disloyalty…. Had we been permitted to enjoy, in quiet, the inheritance left us by our forefathers, we should, at this time, have been peaceably, cheerfully, and usefully employed in recommending ourselves, by every testimony of devotion, to your Majesty, and of veneration to the state, from which we derive our origin…. We ask but for Peace, Liberty, and Safety.”

Whatever high hopes the delegates may have had for the Petition, they were soon dashed. Benjamin Franklin reported from London that the Petition was just dumped on Parliament as part a “great heap” of correspondence from the colonies. The king never responded to it and likely never saw it.

The images are a photo of the Petition and Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Richard Henry Lee, who chaired the committee that drafted it.

10/22/2026

Today in American history, a small New England town sent up a bold message. In Taunton, Massachusetts, colonists raised a flag emblazoned with the word “Liberty,” one of the first public declarations of open defiance to British rule. The Taunton Flag—often described as a British Red Ensign altered with “Liberty and Union”—captured a turning point: many colonists still imagined reconciliation, but they were now willing to proclaim core principles in the town square.

What many don’t know: the flag was reportedly sewn under the guidance of Judge Robert Treat Paine’s cousin, influenced by local leaders who had just formed a Committee of Correspondence. They chose the courthouse green for a reason—turning a symbol of royal authority into a stage for protest. Within months, similar banners and liberty poles spread, giving the resistance a visual language before a national flag even existed.

The Taunton Flag didn’t declare independence yet; it declared intent. It signaled that ordinary communities were ready to organize, communicate, and stand together—laying the groundwork for a revolution built on shared ideals of liberty and union.

10/21/2026

A 1722 law prohibited New Hampshire settlers from cutting down any white pine trees more than one foot in diameter. Those trees, the law declared, belonged to the king for potential use in naval construction. For decades the law was honored in the breach and rarely enforced. But after John Wentworth was appointed royal governor of the colony he decided to crack down on violations. In April 1772 royal authorities arrested sawmill owner Ebenezer Mudgett of Weare, New Hampshire, and charged him with breaking the law.

New Englanders had long resented the so-called “pine mast laws” as infringements on their livelihoods and their liberties. The night of his arrest, after being released on bail, Mudgett and about 20 other townsmen disguised themselves and broke into room in the local inn where the sheriff and his deputy were staying. Mudgett and his colleagues seized the two men, beat them, then ran them out of town before a jeering crowd of onlookers. Mudgett and eight others were later arrested and charged with rioting and assault. A sympathetic judge gave them nominal fines as their punishment.

In the aftermath of the affair the pine tree became a symbol of the resistance to royal authority, and the so-called Pine Tree Riot may have helped inspire the Boston Tea Party. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, New England Continental troops flew “pine tree flags”—red battle flags with a pine tree on the upper left.

In October 1775 George Washington commissioned a pine tree flag for the American navy. Washington’s design was a pine tree on a white field, above which appeared the words “An Appeal to Heaven.” The phrase, frequently used by the revolutionaries, appeared in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. “For whenever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice,” Locke wrote, “war is made upon the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven.” The scripture cited by Locke in support of his argument made clear his meaning: an appeal to heaven for victory in war. In other words, when there is no just temporal authority to whom the oppressed can appeal, their final option is to take up arms and appeal to heaven.

The images are the Bunker Hill Pine Tree Flag and Washington’s naval Pine Tree Flag.

10/19/2026

Gen Thomas Sumter Chapter SAR Provisional President John Carroll spoke last week to the Council of Safety Chapter NSDAR in Americus. We are thankful that our two organizations have great mutual support for one another.

10/19/2026

Cornwallis Surrenders at Yorktown
On this day in 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis formally surrenders 8,000 British soldiers and seamen to a French and American force at Yorktown, Virginia, bringing the American Revolution to a close.
Previously, Cornwallis had driven General George Washington's Patriot forces out of New Jersey in 1776, and led his Recoats in victory over General Horatio Gates and the Patriots at Camden, South Carolina, in 1780. His subsequent invasion of North Carolina was less successful, however, and in April 1781, he led his weary and battered troops toward the Virginia coast, where he could maintain seaborne lines of communication with the large British army of General Henry Clinton in New York City. After conducting a series of raids against towns and plantations in Virginia, Cornwallis settled in Yorktown in August. The British immediately began fortifying the town and the adjacent promontory of Gloucester Point across the York River
Washington instructed the Marquis de Lafayette, who was in Virginia with an American army of around 5,000 men, to block Cornwallis' escape from Yorktown by land. In the meantime, Washington's 2,500 troops in New York were joined by a French army of 4,000 men under the Count de Rochambeau. Washington and Rochambeau made plans to attack Cornwallis with the assistance of a large French fleet under the Count de Grasse, and on August 21 they crossed the Hudson River to march south to Yorktown. Covering 200 miles in 15 days, the allied force reached the head of Chesapeake Bay in early September.
Meanwhile, a British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves failed to break French naval superiority at the Battle of Virginia Capes on September 5, denying Cornwallis his expected reinforcements. Beginning September 14, de Grasse transported Washington and de Rochambeau's men down the Chesapeake to Virginia, where they joined Lafayette and completed the encirclement of Yorktown on September 28. De Grasse landed another 3,000 French troops carried by his fleet. During the first two weeks of October, the 14,000 Franco-American troops gradually overcame the fortified British positions with the aid of de Grasse's warships. A large British fleet carrying 7,000 men set out to rescue Cornwallis, but it was too late.
On October 19, General Cornwallis surrendered 7,087 officers and men, 900 seamen, 144 cannons, 15 galleys, a frigate and 30 transport ships. Pleading illness, he did not attend the surrender ceremony, but his second-in-command, General Charles O'Hara, carried Cornwallis' sword to the American and French commanders. As the British and Hessian troops marched out to surrender, the British band played the song "The World Turned Upside Down."
Although the war persisted on the high seas and in other theaters, the Patriot victory at Yorktown effectively ended fighting in the American colonies. Peace negotiations began in 1782, and on September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed, formally recognizing the United States as a free and independent nation after eight years of war. 🇺🇸🇫🇷

10/08/2026

Kings Mountain!!!