In the spring of 1862, more than twenty-five hundred hill people gathered at Looney’s Tavern for a neutrality meeting. C. C. Sheats, Winston’s delegate to the Secession Convention and one of twenty-four delegates who refused to sign the Secession Ordinance, was the principal speaker. The convention requested that “the Confederacy on the one hand, and the Union on the other, leave us alone, unmolested, that we may work out our political and financial destiny here in the hills and mountains of Northwest Alabama.” When the neutrality proclamation was read, “Uncle Dick” Payne, a Confederate sympathizer who later served the CSA under Longstreet, remarked, “Oh, oh, Winston secedes! The Free State of Winston!,” giving the county its individualistic name.