The Hanna's Town Resolves were one of the most direct challenges to British authority in their North American colonies preceding the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolutionary War. Before most other colonial communities took a stand, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania residents proclaimed their willingness to take drastic measures to maintain and defend their rights against British oppression.
On May 16, 1775, settlers in the far west of Pennsylvania, along with Arthur St. Clair (The Penn government’s local representative) gathered at the tavern, which was also serving as the courthouse, in Hanna's Town (or Hannastown near present-day Greensburg, Pennsylvania) and affixed their names to the Hanna's Town Resolves agreeing to bind themselves together and to take up arms if necessary to resist further "tyrannical" acts of Parliament. More than a year later, the Declaration of Independence would be signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was the first such declaration in any of the British colonies, occurring a few weeks before the Mecklenburg Resolves in North Carolina.
This seemingly drastic action was due largely to the composition of the local population of this then frontier wilderness region. "In the main they were the landless, the disinherited and the disenfranchised. They were bold, aggressive, hardy, courageous and self-reliant. They often had little respect for authority or title. Having experienced arbitrary and capricious government in England, they were zealous defenders of personal liberty and self-government".
Hanna's Town, founded in 1773 and named for its founder Robert Hanna, who signed the Hanna's Town Resolves, acted as the first seat of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and the first English court west of the Alleghany Mountains. Seven years after the signing of the Resolves, British troops and their Native American allies burned Hanna's Town to the ground in one of the last actions of the American Revolutionary War. The town was never to recover. Its site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Site of Old Hannastown in 1972.
For a complete electronic text of the Hanna's Town Resolves.