Hanover County was organized in 1720 and named for George I, King of England and former elector of Hanover in Germany. Construction of the courthouse began between 1737 and 1738 and was completed in 1743, with a slate roof, Flemish-bond brickwork, and an arched porch or loggia that echoed the Capitol and public buildings at Williamsburg. James Skelton, sheriff of Hanover County in 1738, may have built it, and he later served as contractor for rebuilding the Capitol in Williamsburg after it burned. On July 20, 1774, the freeholders of Hanover County met there and passed the Hanover Resolves, directed to Patrick Henry and John Syme, the county’s representatives to Virginia’s first revolutionary convention. The resolves declared that the people were freemen who would never be taxed except by their own representatives, called for a general congress of deputies from all the colonies, and stated that the African trade for slaves was most dangerous to virtue and the welfare of the country and should be totally discouraged. Patrick Henry, born in Hanover County on May 29, 1736, became Virginia’s leading defender of Colonial American rights. He gained fame as a young lawyer in the Parsons’ Cause at Hanover Courthouse in 1763, advanced the principles of the American Revolution in his 1765 resolutions against the Stamp Act, and in 1775 delivered the words “Give me liberty or give me death” at the Second Virginia Convention at Saint John’s Church before fellow delegates George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Known as the Voice of the Revolution, Henry served twenty-six years in the Virginia legislature and five terms as governor, helped draft the Virginia Constitution of 1776 and its Declaration of Rights, strongly influenced the creation of the Bill of Rights as a critic of the U.S. Constitution, and was buried after his death at Red Hill Plantation, now the site of the Patrick Henry National Memorial.
