Birthplace of the Nation:

$19.95

A Story Worth Telling

Leedstown, Westmoreland and the Northern Neck

Leading the Way to Independence.

Carl F. Flemer, Jr.

          With Jenni Brockman

Some say Jamestown is where it all began.

But while Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the New World., no one in the young colony ever could have imagined a “United States of America.” This thinking did not occur until a century later, on the tobacco plantations of Westmoreland County, in the isolated Northern Neck of Virginia. On February 27, 1766, 115 local citizens signed the Leedstown Resolves, a traitorous but extremely courageous resolution protesting the Stamp Act that was America’s first grassroots written protest against England.

Carl F. Flemer, Jr., a lifelong resident of Westmoreland, brings the county’s colonial and early American history alive, from John Smith’s river explorations to the closing of a school named for George Washington. He profiles the great patriots with Westmoreland roots, who include three of our first five presidents and the nation’s longest-serving chief justice. Most important of all, he addresses the question that has been overlooked by generations of historians; why did an overwhelmingly large proportion of the descendants of British immigrants to the area become the most passionate military and political leaders of the American Revolution?

“No other county in the entire country can come close to the richness and significance of Westmoreland’s history.”

–Dr. Charles Bryan, Director, Virginia Historical Society

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