Edmund Pendleton, for whom the county was named in 1798, was born in 1721 and died in 1803. He was a patriot statesman and Virginian who served in the House of Burgesses from 1752 to 1774, sat in the First Continental Congress, was governor of colonial Virginia from 1774 to 1776, presided over the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1776, and led the Virginia State Convention that ratified the Federal Constitution in 1788. He was chief of the State Court of Appeals from 1779 to 1803. The county was formed from Bracken and Campbell.