The Fair Play Men were illegal settlers (squatters) who established their own system of self-rule from 1773 to 1785 in the West Branch Susquehanna River valley of Pennsylvania in what is now the United States. Because they settled in territory claimed by Native Americans, they had no recourse to the Pennsylvania colonial government. Accordingly they established what was known as the Fair Play System, with three elected commissioners who ruled on land claims and other issues for the group. In a remarkable coincidence, the Fair Play Men made their own Declaration of Independence from Britain on July 4, 1776 beneath the "Tiadaghton Elm" on the banks of Pine Creek.
Read more about Fair Play Men: The 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, The Fair Play System, The Pine Creek Declaration of Independence, The Big Runaway, After The War, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the words fair, play and/or men:
“Wake from thy nest, robin redbreast!
Sing, birds, in every furrow,
And from each bill let music shrill
Give my fair Love good morrow!”
—Thomas Heywood (1575?–1650)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“and men strive with each other not for power or the accumulation of paper
but in joy create for others the house, the poem, the game of
athletic beauty.
Then washed in the brightness of the vision,
I saw how in its radiance would grow and be nourished and suddenly
burst into terrible and splendid bloom
the blood-red flower of revolution.”
—Dudley Randall (b. 1914)