Long before cars rushed along Rockville’s West Jefferson Street on their way to Interstate 270, and before the English Georgian-style Grey Courthouse dominated South Washington Street, a modest four-room, 1½-story log and clay building stood near the current intersection of the two streets. It was inside Charles Hungerford’s tavern on June 11, 1774, that a group of 10 men describing themselves as a “respectable and numerous body” led the area in its first steps toward revolution.
Judged by modern sensibilities, the leaders of the Hungerford meeting might be considered unlikely rebels. Many owned large amounts of land. All but one enslaved Black people. Their location in lower Frederick County (Montgomery County would not come into existence until 1776) did not appear to be a breeding ground for insurrection. Settlers in the region during the 18th century “multiplied and prospered, and the remunerative prices obtained for tobacco, which could be so successfully grown on their new lands, stimulated their enterprise,” according to a book about the county published in 1879.
Nevertheless, those gathered wanted to protest the British crackdown on Boston for its resistance to paying taxes imposed by Parliament.The group—which included Thomas Sprigg Wootton and Zadok Magruder, who now each have a Montgomery County high school named for them—pledged to stand with the Massachusetts port city in a decision that has become known as the Hungerford Resolves. “[I]t is the opinion of this meeting,” the group asserted, “that the town of Boston is now suffering in the common cause of America.”
Little is known about what transpired that day at the tavern or who was present beyond the men identified in the Resolves, says John Riedl, a professor in the History and Political Science Department at Montgomery College who teaches a course on Maryland history. Women weren’t present, unless they were serving male customers, says historian and author Susan Cooke Soderberg of Germantown.
The tavern setting suggests that deliberations about the Resolves could have been quite casual, Riedl says. Taverns functioned as gathering places where wealthy planters and enslavers mingled with small farmers and cultivated their support for the enslavement economy. Given the informality that often prevailed at these establishments, it is possible that the Resolves—four one-sentence statements of principle and a fifth delegating men to represent the region in Annapolis—were simply read to taverngoers and approved “with roars of acclaim,” Riedl speculates.
Regardless of how the Resolves were adopted, the dangers posed by a public declaration of support for Boston and condemnation of Britain—especially for those individuals who were named—were immediately clear. “To put your name on the document was a risky proposition. It could be personally not in your economic interest to do so,” says Matthew Logan, executive director of Montgomery History, the county’s historical society.
The men named in the Resolves “were risking pretty much everything,” Logan says. “If they had not been successful, you can imagine the retribution that would have been directed toward them and countless others around the colonies who supported revolution.”
Discontent had been simmering in the colonies for years, Riedl says. After the French and Indian War concluded in 1763, Britain angered colonists by imposing taxes to defray the costs of colonial defense. The Stamp Act, requiring tax stamps to be attached to newspapers and legal and commercial documents, proved particularly provocative. In 1765, county officials in Frederick refused to affix tax stamps to public documents. It is thought to have been the first act of resistance in the colonies to the Stamp Act, Soderberg says.
Eight years later, developments hundreds of miles to the north of Maryland turned discontent to outrage. The flash point was a British tax on tea.
On Dec. 16, 1773, Bostonians disguised as Native Americans boarded British ships to toss more than 340 chests of tea into the frigid water of Boston Harbor, according to Harlow Giles Unger’s American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution. The government of King George III responded to the destruction of the cargo (valued at $1.7 million in 2023, according to the Census Bureau) by doubling down. In early 1774, Parliament closed the port of Boston and abolished local self-government in Massachusetts.
The measures stoked indignation from New England to South Carolina and brought Maryland into the fray. “Like a lot of places, Maryland was kind of straddling the fence until 1774,” Riedl says.
The Hungerford Resolves declared that “the most effectual means for the securing of American freedom will be to break off all commerce with Great Britain and the West Indies” until the hated tea tax was repealed. The Resolves further urged that “every legal and constitutional measure ought to be used by all America” to pressure Parliament into lifting the blockade of Boston Harbor and demanded that “the right of taxation [be] given up on permanent principles.”
Resistance soon accelerated and intensified. In October 1774, the tea-laden Peggy Stewart was set ablaze by its owner as angry residents of Annapolis refused to let its cargo come ashore. The victory of Massachusetts fighters over British troops at Concord and Lexington in April 1775 emboldened the colonies to embrace armed resistance. Gen. Richard Montgomery, for whom Montgomery County is named, died leading American forces in an unsuccessful attack on Quebec at the end of the year. Maryland’s last royal governor, Sir Robert Eden, departed for England on June 23, 1776. The Continental Congress declared independence less than two weeks later.
There was no going back. The Hungerford Resolves, adopted two years earlier, pointed the way forward.
This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.
