Timothy Matlack, Fighting Quaker

Timothy Matlack was buried not far from here, though his story began in the heart of revolutionary Philadelphia. He was the skilled penman who engrossed the final parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, his hand producing the document the world remembers. But Matlack was more than a calligrapher.

He was disowned by the Society of Friends and later helped found the Society of Free Quakers, the breakaway group known as Fighting Quakers. He served as a colonel in the Philadelphia militia and spent years as secretary to Pennsylvania's Supreme Executive Council. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress in seventeen eighty.

He died in eighteen twenty-nine at a remarkable age, reinterred near this road in nineteen oh five.