Through doing this series, I have learned so much! I had no idea that one of the signers actually made cannon balls! Here are two different descriptions of Taylor’s life and accomplishments.
George Taylor was born in 1716 in Ireland. He immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1736, where he worked as an iron worker for Samuel Nutt at Coventry Forge near Philadelphia.
Nutt died in 1737 and by 1743, Taylor was managing the iron furnace and married to Ann Taylor Savage. Ann died in 1768, and Taylor later had a relationship with Naomi Smith, his housekeeper, with whom he had five children out of wedlock.
Taylor’s political career began in 1747 when he was commissioned captain in the Chester County militia. He served as a justice of the peace when he moved to Easton, Pennsylvania, a member of the provincial assembly, and a judge of the county court. His ironworks, which remained his chief business, became vital during the Revolution, casting grapeshot, cannonballs, bar shot, and cannon for the Continental Army.
In July 1776, Taylor was one of several selected as representatives to the Continental Congress to replace members that had refused to sign the Declaration of Independence; he appended his signature to the document on August 2, 1776.
In March 1777, he was elected to the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, but served only six weeks before retiring due to illness and financial straits. Taylor died on February 23, 1781, at the age of 65.
Next, a slightly different take.
He arrived in America as an indentured servant, basically bound labor, shoveling coal to pay off the debt of his own passage. He would end up signing the Declaration of Independence and forging the cannonballs that helped win the war. Meet George Taylor, the ultimate American underdog.
Of all the signers, nobody started lower than this man.
Taylor was born in Ireland around 1716. In 1736, as a young man with nothing, he sailed to America the only way he could afford, which was to sell his own labor. An ironmaster near Philadelphia paid for his passage across the ocean, and in exchange Taylor was bound to work off that debt as an indentured servant. He wasn’t free. He was property of a contract, and his first job was brutal, shoveling coal at a blazing iron furnace.
Think about the gap here. Most of the men who signed the Declaration were wealthy planters and Cambridge-educated lawyers. George Taylor was a laborer sweating in front of a furnace to pay off a boat ticket.
But he was sharp, and he worked. He climbed from coal shoveler to clerk in the furnace office. When his master died, Taylor married the man’s widow and took over running the ironworks entirely, and under his hand the business thrived. The indentured servant became the ironmaster. The man who once shoveled the coal now owned the fire.
Then the Revolution called him up in the most fitting way imaginable. In 1775 he was brought into Pennsylvania’s delegation to replace a member who refused to support independence, and in 1776 he signed the Declaration of Independence. He remains the only former indentured servant ever to sign it, and one of only three Irish-born signers.
And here’s the beautiful part. Taylor didn’t just sign the words. He armed them. His iron furnaces went to work for the Continental Army, producing cannon, cannonballs, and ammunition for the fight. The same fires that had once been his prison as a bound laborer were now forging the tools of American freedom. He literally helped supply the war with the skill his servitude
Calling-all-RushBabes 