PRINCETON — Resuming our look at the history of Mercer County, courtesy of Kyle McCormick’s “The Story of Mercer County” (Charleston Publishing Co. 1957), and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, courtesy of Benson J. Lossing’s “Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,” which is a reprint of the 1848 original kindly provided on loan by Dr. O.J. Bailes, we now look at a history of local aviation in Mercer County.

The first historical incident related to aviation in Mercer County occurred when two Curtis airplanes were brought in by the railroad on flat cars in 1912. They were assembled, but they failed to get off the ground.

About 1914, a plane was brought to Bluefield, which flew to about a height of 500 feet before a large crowd.

In 1920, Eddie Stinson, a nationally known aviator, came to the Mercer County Fair. He took about 100 passengers up for flights while there. Alva Little, John Scott, Robert Baldwin Jr., Chester Crowell and Wilson Dunn were local early aviators.

John P. Wood, of Big Stone Gap, Va., came to Bluefield and established air passenger service to Roanoke, Charleston and Bristol. He later became president of the Northwest Airwave Service, of Wisconsin.

Baldwin got others interested in starting a local airfield in Bluefield along the current Stadium Drive in Bluefield, near the present Mitchell Stadium. He got interest from C.W. Freeman, James Elwood Jones, Laurence E. Tierney, W.E.E. Koepler, Frank Houston and Jim Shott. Air taxi service was established with the surrounding country, and Shott became president of the company.

Going to the Lossing book, we come to Charles Carroll “of Carrollton,” as he signed his name to the Declaration of Independence. Carroll, of Irish ancestry, was born on Sept. 20, 1737. When he was 8, his Roman Catholic father enrolled him in the Jesuit College of St. Omeer’s in France. After six years there, he went to another Jesuit seminary of learning at Rheims, where he spent one year before entering the College of Louis le Grand where he graduated at the age of 17. He then commenced the study of law at Bourges, where he remained one year before moving to Paris, where he lived until 1757, then moved to London for the purpose of continuing his law studies there. He took apartments at the Inner Temple and resided there until 1765 when he came back to Maryland.

The Stamp Act turned him toward the side of the American patriots, and he became associated with Samuel Chase, William Paca and Joseph Stone, among others, in the various patriotic movements of the day, namely a newspaper war with the loyalists in the colony that the latter lost badly.

In 1771-72, he wrote a series of essays against the assumed right of the British government to tax the colonies without their consent under the name "The First Citizen". While anonymous at first, when his authorship became known ,his popularity greatly increased.

Carroll saw early on that a resort to arms was inevitable, and he made his opinion known. He was appointed a member of the first Committee of Safety of Maryland and in 1775, he was elected to the Provincial Assembly. A visit to Philadelphia to observe the Continental Congress saw him, along with Chase and Benjamin Franklin, appointed to a committee to visit Canada in order to ascertain its sympathies to the Revolution. After that, he returned to Maryland to work on having the restrictive instructions upon its delegation when it came to voting upon independence removed. After successfully doing so, he was elected to the Continental Congress too late to vote on the Declaration of Independence, but in time to sign it “Charles Carroll of Carrollton,” doing so to distinguish himself from  a cousin of the same name in case trouble came.

Ten days after taking his seat in Congress, Carroll was named to the Board of War, where he remained for his entire tenure. Remaining in the Provincial Assembly at the same time, he helped frame a State Constitution for Maryland as an independent state in 1776. After its passage, he was elected to the State Senate.

Carroll retired from the Congress in 1788, devoting himself to the interests of Maryland. He was then elected to the State Senate in 1781 and continued until the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. In 1788, he was elected one of the first two U.S. Senators from Maryland, where he remained for two years. In 1791, he was again elected to the Maryland Senate where he continued until 1801, when he was defeated as a candidate for re-election and retired from public service at the age of 64. He lived to see his grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up and died, the last survivor of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, in Baltimore on November 14, 1832, age 95.

See you next time. To share input on this column, contact me c/o Mercer County Memories” at jharvey1@frontiernet.net or delimartman@yahoo.com.