One mile to the south, Red Hill was Patrick Henry’s last home and burial place. He came there in 1794 and died at his beloved Red Hill in 1799, and the marble stone covering his grave bears the inscription, “His fame his best epitaph.” The property remained in his descendants’ hands until 1944, when the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation purchased it. Today the Foundation maintains Henry’s law office, reconstructed story-and-half house, plantation buildings, and a visitor center housing rare family artifacts in the E. Stuart James Grant Museum; the site also features the national champion Osage orange tree and scenic trails overlooking the Staunton River valley, where the fields and forests remain virtually unchanged from the pastoral landscape Henry enjoyed during the last decade of the 18th century. Elected Virginia’s first governor, Henry never held national office, yet his oratory, empathy with his constituents, and defense of Colonial Americans’ rights helped make the Revolution a more popular movement by explaining it in words ordinary people understood. Thomas Jefferson said, “It is not now easy to say what we should have done without Patrick Henry. He was before us all in maintaining the spirit of the Revolution.” Born in Hanover County on May 29, 1736, Henry became a young lawyer of note 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 delivered “Give me liberty or give me death” at Saint John’s Church in 1775 before fellow delegates George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Known as the “Voice of the Revolution,” he 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, criticized the U.S. Constitution, and strongly influenced creation of the Bill of Rights. A devoted father of seventeen children, he declined several high offices late in life, was elected again to the House of Burgesses in 1799, and was buried at Red Hill Plantation after dying before taking office.