By Joey Smith
Virginia had George Mason and George Washington. Massachusetts had Paul Revere. Johnston County had the Smiths, the Bryans and a courthouse on the Neuse River without a highway sign.
Nobody argues about Johnston County’s date. It is sitting in the Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 9, signed, dated and documented. No dispute. No controversy. Just forgotten.
That is the point of this column.
Look at the North Carolina state flag. Two dates are sewn into it. May 20, 1775, and April 12, 1776. Mecklenburg and Halifax. Every kid in this state learns those dates. They are on highway signs and in textbooks and on whiteboards from Murphy to Manteo. Ask any North Carolinian which county stood up first against the British Crown and they will tell you Mecklenburg. Some will say Halifax.
Nobody says Johnston County.
On Aug. 12, 1774, Johnston County men signed their own declaration at a courthouse that did not even have a town around it yet. Smithfield would not be incorporated for another three years. Historians have argued for two centuries about whether the Mecklenburg date happened the way North Carolina claims. That debate has never been settled. Johnston’s did.
To understand what those men did, it helps to know what 1774 looked like. The Boston Tea Party had happened the previous December. Parliament responded with the Coercive Acts, closing Boston’s port and stripping Massachusetts of its self-government. Colonists called them the Intolerable Acts. Up and down the Virginia tidewater, connected planters like George Mason and George Washington were writing declarations and signing their names to them.
Johnston County was not that world. Johnston County in 1774 was backcountry. No port, no major city, no famous planters trading letters with Philadelphia. Just a courthouse beside the Neuse and a county full of farmers who had been reading the same news and deciding someone needed to say something.
A man named Samuel Smith Jr. called the meeting. Nobody sent them an organizing committee. They sat down and wrote out what they believed: that Parliament had no right to tax them without representation, that any man accused of a crime deserved a trial in his own colony and they were done being told otherwise. Then they signed their names to it.
Needham Bryan, Benjamin Williams, William Bryan, John Smith, Henry Rains and William Ward. Not famous men, but Johnston County men.
Signing that document in August 1774 was not a small thing. Lexington and Concord were eight months away. There was no Continental Army, no movement already in motion. If the Crown had held on and the Loyalists had won, those names would have been evidence at a treason trial.
They signed anyway.
Eighteen months later, those same men were running a war.
When North Carolina’s royal governor was run out of his capital, taking up residence on a British warship, the Patriots needed somewhere to meet inland. They picked Johnston’s courthouse on the Neuse. Twice in the fall of 1775, it served as the capital of a colony trying to survive.
The men in that room split North Carolina into military districts and built an army. Needham Bryan was commissioned colonel of the Johnston County Regiment of Militia. John Smith of Smithfield was commissioned major.
In February 1776, they used it. The British plan was to land two armies on the Carolina coast, link up with Loyalists already in the colony and take back the region. At Moore’s Creek Bridge outside Wilmington, Patriot forces pulled up the bridge planks, greased what was left, dug in behind earthworks with two cannons and waited. Before dawn the Loyalists charged, screaming “King George and Broadswords.” The firing lasted three minutes.
Col. Bryan commanded while Major Smith led his men into the fight. Five companies of Johnston County soldiers were in the line. The British Southern strategy was dead before it started, and it would be four years before they tried again. Six weeks later, North Carolina became the first colony to instruct its delegates to vote for independence. On July 4, 1776, they did.
They were in the room when it mattered, and on the field when it counted. This is not a footnote to somebody else’s story. It is its own story. And it has been sitting here, underdressed and underappreciated, for 250 years.
JTHEN is a recurring column in JNOW about the history of Johnston County, the parts that got left out, passed over or just never got their due.
Joey is a Johnston County native, multi-generational county resident and high school history teacher. He is the creator of the JoCoYo podcast, which is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music and Audible.
