Button Gwinnett was a British-born American Founding Father who, as a representative of Georgia to the Continental Congress, was one of the signers of the United States Declaration of Independence.
13 Facts About Button Gwinnett
2.
Gwinnett was, briefly, the provisional president of Georgia in 1777, and Gwinnett County was named for him.
3.
Button Gwinnett was named in honor of his mother's cousin, Barbara Button, who became his godmother.
4.
Button Gwinnett was born in 1735 in the parish of Down Hatherley in the county of Gloucestershire, England, to a Welsh father, the Reverend Samuel Button Gwinnett, and his wife, Anne.
5.
Button Gwinnett was the third of his parents' seven children, born after his older sister Anna Maria and his older brother Samuel.
6.
Button Gwinnett started his career apprenticed to his uncle William Gwinnett, a greengrocer in Gloucester, then moved to Wolverhampton in Staffordshire in 1754 after obtaining a further apprenticeship with an ironmonger there named John Weston Smith.
7.
Button Gwinnett did not become a strong advocate of colonial rights until 1775, when St John's Parish, which encompassed his lands, threatened to secede from Georgia because of the colony's conservative response to the events of the times.
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Isaac Asimov 8.
Button Gwinnett served in the Georgia state legislature, and in 1777 he wrote the original draft of Georgia's first state constitution.
9.
Button Gwinnett became Speaker of the Georgia Assembly, a position he held until the death of the President of Georgia Archibald Bulloch.
10.
Button Gwinnett was elevated to the vacated position by the Assembly's Executive Council.
11.
Button Gwinnett ordered McIntosh to lead an invasion of British-controlled East Florida, which failed.
12.
Button Gwinnett was not charged in connection with Gwinnett's death.
13.
The 1953 Isaac Asimov short story "Button, Button" concerns an attempt to obtain a genuine signature of Gwinnett by means of a device that can move objects through time.