John Penn

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under John Penn (disambiguation) .

John Penn's signature

John Penn (born May 17, 1741 near Port Royal in Caroline County , Colony of Virginia , colony of the Kingdom of Great Britain , today USA ; † September 14, 1788 at Island Creek, Granville County , North Carolina , USA) was a British-US American lawyer and politician. As representative of North Carolina, he signed the United States' Declaration of Independence , making him one of the founding fathers of the United States .

The son of Moses Penn and Catherine Taylor studied at home and went to school for only a few years. At the age of 18, after the death of his father, he studied law privately with his relative Edmund Pendleton . He became a lawyer in Virginia in 1762 and moved to Williamsboro in Granville County , North Carolina in 1774 , where he practiced.

On July 28, 1763, he married Susannah Lyne. The couple had three children: William, who never married, and Lucy, who married John Taylor of Caroline , another fatherless relative whom Edmund Pendleton had tutored.

Penn was elected to the Provincial Congress and from 1775 to 1780 to the Continental Congress. He also worked on the council of war until he retired in 1780 to practice law again. In 1777 he was one of the signatories of the articles of confederation from North Carolina , in 1784 a tax collector for North Carolina. After his death in 1788 he was buried near his country estate on Island Creek in Granville County, but in 1894 he was reburied in the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park , where he now lies next to his fellow delegate William Hooper .