George Taylor

George Taylor was born in Ireland about 1716 and came to Pennsylvania as a young man, traditionally as an indentured servant at an ironworks. He rose to become an ironmaster in the Lehigh Valley, operating furnaces that later supplied shot and shell to the Continental Army. He sat in the colonial assembly and in 1776 was appointed to the Continental Congress as Pennsylvania reorganized its delegation. He had not been a member on 4 July, but he signed the engrossed Declaration. Ill health limited his later service in Congress. Taylor's ironworks depended in part on bound and enslaved labor, a fact that belongs in any honest account of his rise. He died in 1781. His path from indentured laborer to signer is one of the most striking among the fifty-six, and it does not cancel the harder parts of the record.

See also: Signers of the Declaration · James Smith of Pennsylvania · John Morton · George Clymer · George Ross